This fast-paced doujin grappling game promises exhilarating action and high difficulty. Does it deliver? I suppose so.

This game is loosely associated with the Umihara Kawase speedrunning community. The link is the grapple hook-based gameplay, but NSHG is much more about fast, linear action. It does directly cite UK as an inspiration, along with the “easy mechanics, hard stages” of the “Mario Bros. series”[sic], the hookshot of the Zelda series, and the quick death/respawn loop of games like I Wanna Be the Guy.

I feel like some of these are kind of just namedropping popular things… the hook mechanic here is all about managing your momentum. It’s certainly a steeper learning curve than jumping in Mario, and much more involved than any of Zelda’s basic hookshots. As for IWBTG, it’s true that both checkpoints and deaths are frequent, but the problem I ran into with both this game and its predecessor (an earlier release without the “New” supertitle) is the time limit, which is rarely a problem in other games of this type.

You see, each stage (or the whole game in the case of the original, since it’s shorter) has a clock counting down. You can die and respawn all you want, but the clock keeps ticking. Get a time over and it’s game over, start again. As the description also warns, stages get longer and harder as the game goes on, and it’s a real bummer to gradually improve step by step only to run out of time and get kicked out. This feels like an anachronistic mechanic for what’s otherwise a modern-feeling game experience.

Aside from this issue I have a lot of esteem for the game. It’s very cute, with over-designed anime girls as the protagonists. They exist as 2D sprites on 3D backdrops, which is just the odd kind of aesthetic I like. The background graphics are nice and painterly, although you don’t get much time to appreciate them as you zoom past, hooking your way around the increasingly harsh hazards. There’s a little bit of story too, but it’s in Japanese only.

The entire game is mouse-controlled, which is really interesting. Moving the cursor around affects the motion of your character, and it’s left and right click for hook and jump. This sounds needlessly limiting but it’s well designed around this framework. Maybe not the best for accessibility, but it seems like it’s  targeting a niche anyway. Despite this it seems to have made quite the name for itself, with music albums and merch for sale, a story adventure game spinoff, and an upcoming console port (although I have no idea how the controls will work there).

In those terms it seems like the definition of a success story for a doujin work, and well done to the developers. Unfortunately it was just a little too hard for me to get quite to the ending, especially with that damnable timer. And it’s quite short too; this concept is really fun and I’d love to see a lot more expansion done with it, perhaps in New New/Newer/Newesterer Super Hook Girl. Well, at least it’s free so if you have faith in your mouse arm, why not give it a go?