Full disclosure: with this game’s protagonist being a weird little bald guy with a big nose, I did feel something of a personal affinity with them before I’d even seen a title screen. Henry Halfhead, from Swiss developer Lululu Entertainment and publishers popagenda, began life as a university project where students were tasked with designing a character who had both a significant disadvantage and an exceptional power. The result was Henry Halfhead whose fairly-obvious disadvantage is that they are, as their name would suggest, half a head. Luckily for Henry, they’re not stuck that way forever, as their superpower allows them to transform into any object of their choosing.

Honestly, now that you know the premise and can look at a few screenshot below, that might just be enough for you to make your decision on Henry: I will say that there’s perhaps a little more nuance to the game than meets the eye, and we’ll get onto that, but you probably get the bulk of the idea. That’s not to take anything away from it, rather to say that the elevator pitch here is pretty fantastic, and that it’s already doing something far more unique than, let’s just say (to the surprise of none of our regular readers) yet another roguelike deckbuilder.

Developer: Lululu Entertainment
Publisher: Lululu Entertainment, popagenda
Release: 16 September 2025
Retail Price (Steam): 12,99€/$12.99/£10.99

Save the lack of anything beneath a nose, Henry starts out life as all of us do: an inquisitive young mind ready to escape their cot and cause some mischief. Players quickly work their way through a tutorial of sorts, from possessing their first ball to removing the battery from the baby monitor so Henry’s parents can’t hear them, before they start to get a little more freedom. There’s always a small amount of hand-holding, with concrete goals laid out clearly at the start of each area, which will need to be completed to unlock the next. It does occasionally feel at odds with the sandbox nature of the game: Henry is all-in on playing and exploration, and sometimes you just want to keep messing around without being pointed towards the next step. If you do ever lose yourself, there’s a helpful hint system available that reminds you what you need to do: not hugely important, as it’s typically spelt out for players pretty obviously, but nice to have if you get distracted, or after a break from the game. If you do take a break, everything seemingly remains exactly as you left it, so there’s no problem with quitting and jumping back in later on;

On that sandbox setting, I think you could look at Henry Halfhead and assume there might be significant puzzle elements where you’re having to, for example, hop between objects to access an area, or set up a group of objects in a particular way to cleverly unlock something. There is a small amount of that, but it’s not the focus of the game, so if you’re looking for challenging puzzles there isn’t much of that on offer. What it does offer is a setting that encourages playing and experimenting, though I felt my occasional attempts to rebel were somewhat stifled by the game in a way that I felt could have been dealt with more elegantly. There’s a section where Henry has, as per the narrator, decided to be a good little Halfhead and, should the player decide to go against that, they’ll just be stuck repeating the same misbehaviour over and over again until they agree to actually play ball. Henry behaving here isn’t imperative to his story: If we take another “life in a few hours” game, Before Your Eyes, there are moments where the player is allowed to be disobedient and, while it doesn’t actually change anything later on, that choice is at least acknowledged and accepted.

The game makes a point of recommending using a controller, but, being the rigid PC gamer that I am, the only working controllers I own aren’t even in the same country as me, so I had to make do with the trusty mouse and keyboard. If it weren’t for both Steam and the game telling me “THIS IS BETTER WITH A CONTROLLER” I can’t say I’d have given it a second thought, and I didn’t feel it impacted me at all during the game. What my lack of controllers did prevent was the ability to experiment with the local co-op mode, which I imagine dramatically changes the feel of the game – and I’ll touch on that a lot more in a little while. Instead, the entirety of my playthrough was spent in the single player version. That playthrough took just under three and a half hours, which is a little more content than I was expecting – though perhaps the developers aren’t accounting for players like me to spend quite so long making as big a tower as possible as baby-Henry. The premise is stretched to its limit in that time: you’re certainly not bored of it by the time the credits roll, but were it much longer I’d suggest it would start overstaying its welcome. I’m reliably told that I possessed 85% of 300 possible unique items, and while there’s a catalogue unlocked at the end of the first playthrough so that completionists can try and identify what they’re missing and go back to collect those, I’m satisfied leaving it there.

There’s some excellent writing in the game, which is performed wonderfully by developer-cum-voice-actor Leander Schneeberger, the ever-present and reassuring narrator who immediately sets the tone in Henry Halfhead. I say immediately: it’s actually set even earlier than your first interaction with the narrator when Henry’s zany theme tune, from musician Lucien Guy Montandon, hits you in the title screen.

There is, however, something that bothers me about the game’s story – and I guess, to some extent, its overall vibe; something that, for me, felt ever-so-slightly…. off. As fun as doing the laundry by being the laundry or turning myself into a paper plane was, it’s what’s really stuck with me in the days following my playthrough, and so, if you’ll humour me, the rest of this article is dedicated almost exclusively to that.

I promise this is going somewhere: I once had to do a creative writing exercise as a teenager where our teacher asked us to submit only the first and final paragraphs of a short story, with the rest to be completed later in the year. When I sat down to do it, I was far too ambitious in terms of how my two characters’ relationship would develop – the opening established that they didn’t know one another, and the ending was them tearily bidding each other farewell. Once the time came round to write the rest of the story, there was nowhere near enough room for those characters to become that close, and the ending, unchanged, made no sense at all. Tonally, it came out of nowhere and was, effectively, the ending to a completely different story, tacked onto something that had less emotional depth than what I’d originally planned.

And though that’s probably too harsh an analogy – not least because Henry Halfhead does have emotional depth – that’s kind of how I felt about the game’s ending. Because for me, that depth was found somewhere which didn’t line up with the words the narrator offered as he closed things off; found in something completely different to the conclusion the game gave me. It was framed as a celebration of a life exceptionally well-lived, but for me, it had been a pretty lonesome existence.

That’s not a bad thing – there're so many excellent games about loneliness, but I don’t know that that’s necessarily what Lululu were aiming for here. I understand that not everyone’s idea of a fulfilling life is the same, so it could well be personal bias slipping in, but I drew drastically different conclusions on Henry’s life than those of his creators. One of my earliest notes when playing – not yet one hour into a three and a half hour playthrough – was on how lonely it was all starting to feel. Perhaps once that idea was there in my head it was clung onto and reinforced: there are so many fun things to do with Henry, but when you’re scribbling drawings on the floor that nobody else will ever see, stacking furniture on rugs just to beat your own best score, making things beautiful (or more often, messy) and it’s only for your own benefit, performing music for yourself and yourself alone… I felt like a kid in an empty playground.

It was that juxtaposition which made me feel – not always, but often enough that it’s my main takeaway – disquieted. There were plenty of moments that I’d get lost in the fun, the majority of the game, in fact: I don’t want it to sound like I was miserably dragging myself through Henry’s existence. Even when that familiar feeling would creep back in, I wouldn't call it a negative experience per se, and I should note that there’s at least one point where it’s done entirely by design, but for me, there was no turning point afterwards, when there was clearly supposed to be – Henry remained, at the crux of it, a sad figure: a character I look back on with pity rather than anything else.

I don’t know how likely it is that my experience would be replicated for you, the person reading this article, if you were to go and play Henry Halfhead right now. Perhaps with that seed planted, you’ll notice it too. Perhaps you would’ve anyway, or perhaps you wouldn’t see it that way at all. But I think, for all of that, intentional or otherwise, I actually prefer the game. Henry felt more real for it: even if I disagreed with the narrator as he drew the curtain on Henry’s life, I certainly felt something for the little guy.

There’s also the elephant in the room: that there can be another Henry in the room. The dynamic – at least the way I experienced it – would, naturally, be changed so dramatically by having someone else around the whole time. As mentioned, I wasn’t able to experiment with the co-op mode, but suddenly I’d not have been a kid in an empty playground, but a kid in a playground with a good friend: no longer doing all the funnest things the game offers behind closed doors, but with someone else. As is said in the game’s trailer: “double the Henry, double the fun.”

Games like the previously-mentioned Before Your Eyes. or similar games that tell a full life story, like Unpacking (both of which, for what it’s worth, probably make my Top 20 indies) are pretty overt with the fact that they’re aiming to get an emotional response from their players. There is, I think, a lot more subtlety in Henry Halfhead; I have no doubts that it must be incredibly challenging to create a story that’s emotionally relatable with the core premise of being half-a-head that possesses inanimate objects. I think Lululu achieve that to an extent with Henry, though it definitely sacrifices some of that emotion in order to be something a little more enjoyable. It is, first and foremost, a fun game, with the story adding purpose, rather than being the purpose.

It’s a bit of a confusing one: my favourite thing about the game – what gives it a genuine sort of haunting beauty for me – is, arguably, unintentional. Henry Halfhead is a fun and – apparently for this reviewer, at least – enigmatic game. It is awarded a 7.5/10 by IndieLoupe.com.

The reviewed product was provided by the publisher.

Video review: IndieLoupe.com

Review: Henry Halfhead

Henry Halfhead

Review: The Drifter