Act 1 of Homestuck adventure game Hiveswap coming out this month

It's been a long road to release for Hiveswap, the point-and-click adventure set in the universe of webcomic Homestuck. It received nearly $2.5m of backing on Kickstarter back in 2012 before multiple planned release dates—first in 2015, then this January—came and went. Well now it's finally upon us, with the first episode coming September 14.

Don't worry if you haven't read the comics because you don't need any prior knowledge to understand the story. You play Joey Claire, a teen snatched from the mid '90s and transported to an alien world on the brink of rebellion.

Developer What Pumpkin Games promises a "love letter to '90s adventure games", so expect to pick up lots of items that you can combine in imaginative ways to solve puzzles. You will get a unique response from the game every time you try to combine any two given items even if they don't work together, which is neat.

The art is all hand-drawn and, as seen in the trailer at the top of this post, really colourful, and its environments are packed with detail. Plus, the urgent music is courtesy of Toby Fox, who produced Undertale's excellent lo-fi soundtrack. Let's hope the puzzles live up to the presentation.

Similar to Telltale's point-and-click games, decisions you make in Act 1 will influence your story in later Acts, so choose wisely.

Act 1 will cost $7.99 (roughly £6.20) on Steam and the Humble Store (the links aren't live at the time of writing).

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.