You know that trick magicians do where they drape a white sheet over something, tap it with a magic wand, yank the sheet away, and the thing has disappeared? Hadr is a unique new puzzle game by a small indie team that's built around that idea—but where you, inexplicably, play as the sheet. It's a pretty offbeat idea for a game, but it works.
Hadr is best played with a gamepad. You move the sheet with the left analogue stick, make it float in the air with the right trigger. And when you drape it over something, and no part of said object is visible, it disappears and the sheet falls gently to the ground. It's incredibly satisfying to watch, in the same way dropping stuff in holes in Donut County or rolling stuff up in Katamari is.
The sheet moves with a billowy, flowing grace. It's quite hypnotising to look at, and feels wonderful in your hands. It misbehaves sometimes, folding and curling up into itself, but tweak the trigger and it eventually flattens itself out. If this was purely a plaything centred around dropping sheets over objects and watching them vanish, I'd have been into it. But there's a game here too.
In one level I have to swap between three different sheets to get rid of various objects blocking the exit—sometimes combining them to cover objects that are too large for one sheet. It's a pretty tricky puzzle, made more difficult by the fact that, when the level begins, two of the sheets are trapped under heavy objects. You can try this level out for yourself in a free demo.
Hadr looks and sounds great too. The low-poly visuals are nicely minimalist, and the music is fantastic, sounding like something that might have been released on Warp Records in the early 2000s. I also love how all the treble is briefly sucked out of the soundtrack as the sheet devours an object.
Hadr is out now and is very reasonably priced. For about $5 you get 13 levels, which amounts to around 2 hours of clever sheet-based physics puzzling. I've never played anything quite like this before.
