Helpless Hero review: from frustrating to fun in two sittings

During my first playthrough of Helpless Hero, a mobile game developed by a Japan-based studio named Kuma The Bear, I was fill so much rage it compelled me to write about it.

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But as they say, love and hate are two sides of the same coin, and when I picked up Helpless Hero for a second look I came to find it charming and challenging. I also discovered a new feature that made me realize that Helpless Hero is more than just a game trying too hard to be hard.

In Helpless Hero, you play a knight on a quest to save a princess who has been captured by a villain with the most annoying laugh in the world. In your haste to save her, you forget to wear anything aside from a helmet and a pair of underwear. Any attack in your unarmored state instantly reduces you to a pile of bones, and you must ascend over 30 floors, dodging traps and the villain’s minions.

If you just involuntarily raised your eyebrows while reading the last paragraph, don’t worry because the backstory really doesn’t add or detract from the game. Perhaps its best you move on and pretend you didn’t just read that last paragraph, as we talk about some of the more important points of Helpless Hero.

Graphics-wise, Helpless Hero bears your typical 2014 8-bit-wannabe pixel art, which is cute but really low effort. The main character is pretty adorable, but some of the enemy minions look like red piles of poop. I don’t know if the main villain is having a really bad case of piles or something, but he should really get his colon checked out. That’s it, I’m changing the game’s backstory—you’re now on a quest to get to the top of the tower to tell the dude that he should really go see a doctor and get a colonoscopy.

Moving on, Helpless Hero’s gameplay is also pretty standard stuff. It’s a one-button game where you tap once to jump. That’s it. There are no double jumps, backflips, or power-ups. It’s good that they keep the gameplay simple because the rest of the game is crazy hard.

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Using only the power of your jump, you must leap over spikes, red poop piles, and other traps to clear each level. The moment you die, you start over from the first floor and must begin your ascension effort again literally from the ground up.