Last year, I took a look at the demo for Hollywood Animal and came away wanting more. Well, it’s not quite a year later, Hollywood Animal has just had its Early Access launch, and it’s the damnedest thing. I’m still left wanting more, but not in the good way.
To refresh your memory, Hollywood Animal puts you in charge of a recently acquired movie studio at the start of 1929. The stock market crash hasn’t happened yet, businesses are flush, and the last year of the Roaring 20’s looks to be a big one. As the newest movie mogul in Hollywood, it’s up to you to build up your studio’s infrastructure and employee roster and keep the money rolling in. But the bright lights of Tinseltown throw deep shadows which hide terrible secrets and equally terrible people. And you might very easily become one of them.
There does not appear to have been much in the way of improvement visually speaking in Hollywood Animal from the demo. And that’s a good thing. The UI is still good and contextual. The building designs are period appropriate. Movie posters do get a little repetitive in their options, but they’re a minor quibble, really. The plot elements for your movie projects are simple and convey the ideas effortlessly. The audio elements of Hollywood Animal feel like they’ve been fleshed out some from the demo. The music catalog appears to be a little more robust. As for sound effects, those seem to be much the same as they were, but they’re in the same boat as the visuals. One of those pieces that didn’t need to be fiddled with. Still no voice over work, and that’s just fine. If anything, it gives the player a sort of mental freedom to imagine how a character sounds.
As far as the gameplay, Hollywood Animal hasn’t changed much from the demo. And now, we run into the problems. The demo was limited to two years in-game. OK, cool. Starting fresh, whole new thing, I haven’t been able to make it past the two year mark in any appreciable sense despite multiple attempts. At this point, it doesn’t feel like things have moved beyond the demo in terms of gameplay. There are more executable options on the tech tree than in the demo, but I’m seeing a lot of options listed which are locked off because of the current Early Access development plan says those will be coming later. Given the long lead times on some of the research options, it kind of makes for a miserable experience. Worse, some of those lead times just make no sense. And when you combine that with some of the random events that pop up during production or different “friends” you make who introduce specific options, it feels like the current iteration is deliberately trying to screw you over. Shorter lead times to establish structures and technologies, with longer times to improve or enhance them, would seem like a better progression.
I note that there seems to be more of an information vacuum here than in the demo. You’ll occasionally get told that a script idea came together well because you mixed the right elements together (Wild West settings with cowboys make sense, modern cities with knights and wizards less so). But so many times, you’re presented with the overview of the production process and too many elements point to bad times on set without breaking down exactly what happened. Where the demo gave you the straight dope on preferred roles and genres for your stable of actors and production staff, now we’re having to guess and hope that the information comes out eventually. For newcomers in the various employee pools, this might make sense, but for people who’ve been with your studio since before your takeover, it feels a little dissonant. And certainly it feels off for people who are supposedly up-and-coming industry stars. Combine that with a seemingly glacial pace of improvement for staff, and what seemed an acceptable conceit for a demo suddenly looks a lot less appealing in an actual release (even if only an Early Access release).
The information vacuum also comes up on the distribution side of things. You’re told early on that you want to be booking showings in other theaters besides the ones you own. However, the optimum number of those rentals is never well defined. Which means that you’re either overbooking (and losing money) or underbooking (and losing money). Trying to release two films at once is a sure-fire way to burn through your cash reserves in no time flat. Get too far in the hole, and there’s no “Hollywood accounting practices” to save your dumb ass. I’m genuinely trying to figure out what the “one weird trick” is which Hollywood Animal expects of its players which can realistically carry you past the two year mark. The fact such a trick seems to exist is a major pain point. Good movies don’t seem to carry you and releasing an endless string of unprofitable flops hurts worse. All of which could be mitigated, if not avoided, with better information coming in about what would be helpful and what would hurt. I know I complained about being scolded for trying bite off more than I could chew in distribution during the demo, but a function to help pick the “ideal” distribution deal would be helpful.
From a narrative perspective, Hollywood Animal seems to have gotten a little feral having graduated from the demo. Cursed productions happened before, and it’s not necessarily a surprise to see them happen now. I get that. Sometimes, everything just goes wrong. And when it was a demo, trying to impress upon you just how completely pear-shaped one production could go, it was effective. Here, it’s less effective. Since so many options in random events are tied to certain technical advances or social connections, being shut out of those options because you haven’t reached those advances or made those connections feels gratuitously insulting to the player. Keeping those options hidden until those milestones had been hit, or presenting alternate options which have the same result but different requirements, would be a bit more palatable. That said, finding the monkey’s paw elements of certain in-game choices and actions does provide a sense of “Wow, I did not expect that to turn out the way it did.” Having those moments can be enjoyable in a strange way. But they’re few and far between, and whatever momentary amusement is lost in the overwhelming suck of trying to get to Year 3.
I can appreciate, intellectually, that Hollywood Animal is currently in Early Access and that such a state implies a certain amount of fluidity when it comes to the degree of development, what’s locked down and what has yet to be implemented. Where my instinct seems to be fighting my reasoning is the sense that there hasn’t been a whole lot of movement since the demo came out. The content plan offered up by Weappy Wholesome is promising quite a bit. But all of that is moot if they can’t get the early game going in such a way as to hold the player’s interest long enough for them to experience it. If the sense of compression and constraint can be remedied, Hollywood Animal could very well become one those “gotta play” titles. If it can’t, it’s liable to get lost in the underbrush.
Axel reviewed Hollywood Animal in Early Access with a provided review copy.
