While normally I think of the games that suck me in the most as being complex or on the more intense end of the spectrum, with the right premise and play style I’ve found that more relaxed titles can also be very engaging. With its child-like main character, a consistent sense of mischief, and an open-ended sandbox style of puzzle-solving, I’d say Henry Halfhead absolutely qualifies as one of those relaxed but engrossing experiences.

Starting out as a mere baby in his crib, you’ll discover that Henry is blessed with the ability to move his consciousness into objects, allowing him to move and control them to some degree. Once you’ve been armed with this information, you’ll then proceed to simply experiment your way through the game the majority of the time. While the areas you’re in will tend to be small, without any direction your best bet is to simply try jumping into anything you can, manipulating it, and seeing what sort of trouble you can get into. Sometimes your objectives are as simple as making a stack of items that get to a certain height, and in others you’ll need to do things like find a battery that is needed to power an electronic device that you’ll need to trigger something. This does sometimes require that you infer what needs to be done by simply looking at what’s been made available to you, which can sometimes take a few beats, but in general everything is intuitive enough that you’ll figure it out in short order.

The thing is, the real joy here isn’t necessarily in advancing Henry to the next stage of his life or small area that needs to be explored, it’s simply in treating every zone you encounter as a small playground. In some cases your persistence will be rewarded with a new hat or some special thing you can wear, but the fun is really just in experimenting and being a little troublemaker, without any worries for the consequences of the messes you’ll make. I have no doubt that this sort of game will be a love or hate affair, with the more hardcore set finding it slow or pointless, but others simply embracing the fun of discovery and finding enjoyment in playing with the toys you’ve been given. In my case I obviously found it delightful, even understanding that it can only be so deep in the end.