It’s a fairly simple premise, right? Xefros speaks for all of us. HIVESWAP takes place in a parallel dimension, which shares Homestuck‘s established world but isn’t constrained by what’s already happened in the comic, instead telling a new story which sees a human girl transported to the alien world of Alternia, populated by trolls forced into a brutal caste system based on the colour of their blood. Homestuck is absurdly long and complex, featuring a revolving cast of regular characters, over 800,000 words, and a multi-media approach to storytelling that uses static images, gifs and flash animation. HIVESWAP is the crowd-funded game adaptation of Homestuck, an MS Paint Adventures webcomic created by Andrew Hussie in 2009. I’m coming into this review as somebody who’s basically just dipped their toes into Andrew Hussie’s mad brain-child thanks to a recommendation from my partner, so what I’m really looking to discern here is how effectively the source material translates into the gaming medium, and whether it makes any sense to anybody who hasn’t been exposed to it before. So… what is it? I’ll offer as brief a primer as I can, based on my barely functional working knowledge of the Homestuck lore.

Over three years later, fans finally have the second part of the story, and the strange legacy of “ Homestuck: The Video Game” continues. A huge chunk of that money vanished in suspicious circumstances (through no fault of the people running the campaign, but that’s a whole ‘nother rabbit hole), along with much of the original vision for the game. HIVESWAP‘s first act was released in 2017, years after an extremely successful Kickstarter campaign that raised almost two and a half million dollars.

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