Party Hard feels like a contradiction of themes: 80’s party music mixed with killing, the delightful music next to the tense cutscenes, and the mix of fast and slow gameplay. The game is trying to have it all, but this is one party that ends early in my opinion.
Up all Night:
The story of Party Hard is that you play a nameless sociopath, who after being kept awake too many times from parties, decides to go on a killing spree. Each stage has you at a different party with the sole goal to kill every party guest before you are either killed or arrested.
While the stages themselves are fixed locations, there are slight permutations in terms of interactables and possible items to be found when you restart…and you will be restarting a lot. The player is very slow and if anyone gets alerted, there is a good chance that they will be able to outrun the player.
The levels are fixed locations, but there are differing factors each time you play
The game is all about stealth and making sure to kill the party guests without anyone seeing it or the body. Besides your butcher knife, you can use the environment to kill or hide bodies, or escape detection if someone calls the cops.
Each stage usually has two phones that people will try to reach and call the police if they spot any killed guests. Once the police show up, it’s possible for them to arrest the wrong person or simply leave after tagging the bodies.
There isn’t much you can do if the police are on to you: They’re faster than you and cannot be killed by your knife. Your only options are to try to get away using the shortcuts (which only work once to evade) or lure them into a trap. The game is definitely about dark humor, as the catchy party music is played over your murders. Despite the graphic nature of the design, the game’s pixel aesthetic helps to soften the blow.
The game tells an interesting story as a backdrop to the gameplay
As the game goes on, the parties get bigger and it becomes harder to hide your murders from the always moving around guests.
The game features a combo system that rewards quick and constant killing, which in a game like Party Hard is difficult to pull off.
Party Hard is a good example of a game built around one concept taken as far as it can go, but the design clashes with itself in several key areas.
The Death of a Party:
Party Hard is trying to have it both ways: It wants to be brutal, but lighthearted, stealth, but with action, and it just leads to some conflicting elements. Controlling the character felt very awkward to me and the hitboxes for hitting characters didn’t work a lot of times.
There were cases where I went to stab someone within range and the knife just missed, while other times I could go on a mini killing spree. Due to your limited means of winning, one mistake can easily cost you the entire level. Speaking of mistakes, the stealth detection in Party Hard reminds me of Hotline Miami and how unreliable it was.
The game does a horrible job of showing you the sight lines of party guests. There were times where I killed someone in a spot that I thought was safe, only to have someone spot it immediately. In another case, I killed someone right next to someone else and the person didn’t even respond. You’re supposed to go by which directions people are facing, but it doesn’t work when you have characters at different depths on the screen.
Each level plays the same way, but your options are just too limited
The rules of the game are sometimes inconsistent. There were times when I was called out as the murder despite not being near the bodies, other times I got away.
The game’s mechanics are too limited to really give the player a variety of ways or options to complete each level. This presents a problem with the game’s scoring system and trying to give the player the means to go for high scores.
In a game like Hitman that also has you going for a high score, the game rewards you for perfection and doing your job. In this case, the mechanics and the scoring gel together and work.
In Party Hard on the other hand, the game wants you to do speedy kills for high scores and combos, but the game simply doesn’t have the mechanics in place for that to work. You move too slow to catch people, there aren’t enough tricks in your toolbox for varied solutions, and the combo bonus disappears within seconds.
As an interesting problem, the game kept hinting at advanced tactics I could use, such as swords or pizza, but in my entire play of the game all the way to the final level, none of those items ever appeared.
The beauty of Hitman’s gameplay was that the player had a variety of options available to them: Both of the action and stealth variety. You were free to pick and choose what you wanted to use in a level and the game rewarded you accordingly for thinking outside the box. I just don’t see that in Party Hard and found that I won more times thanks to luck rather than skill.
Shutting Down the Party:
I wanted to like Party Hard thanks to the unique theme of the game, but I found myself getting more and more frustrating with the lack of options and repetitive gameplay. For me, this is one party that ends far too soon.
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