Helheim Hassle is the second release from indie studio Perfectly Paranormal and is set in the same universe as its debut release - Manual Samuel. It’s a comedic yet macabre narrative adventure game about friendship and the creative use of body parts to solve puzzles. You play as Bjørn, a pacifist Viking who hates the idea of dying and going to Valhalla (who subsequently dies and gets taken to Valhalla). As he seeks to negotiate his way out, he agrees to help the mysterious Pesto on a quest to retrieve a certain magical item... In return, Pesto will try to grant Bjørn a permanent residence in Helheim. Players are tasked with completing up to 70 quests over 14 levels, requiring the use of all manner of different body part combos to complete the game’s unique puzzle-platforming challenges. On this adventure, players will come into contact with 80 different characters ranging from frustrated god souls, bear ghosts, dragons, elves, dwarves and blue-collar goblins; all voiced by 24 professional voice actors delivering 3,700 lines of spoken dialogue!

The Plan of Attack communications campaign for Helheim Hassle started in January 2020 when we announced the game was coming to PC (Steam), Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, generating 80+ news stories including some huge outlets such as 4Players, Nintendo Life, Xbox Achievements, Gonintendo and Sector.

We continued the campaign by releasing a developer walkthrough video and arranging interviews with creative lead Ozan Drøsdal in March. This generated around 60+ news hits with big outlets Nintendo Life, PlayGround & Xboxdynasty covering the video and 3DJuegos, Everyeye.it & Eurogamer Italy covering the interview.

This strong visibility continued through to May where we released a second developer walkthrough video providing some comedic guidance to some of the game’s puzzles adding a further 20+ hits from outlets such as Nintendo Everything, GameSpew, Nintenderos and GoNintendo.

In the absence of E3 in June, The Escapist Indie Showcase became the event in which Helheim Hassle’s release date was announced. This news was accompanied by a trailer which garnered over 60 hits, with top tier outlets TheXboxHub, Nintendo Insider, GoNintendo, and ntower relaying the message.

Helheim Hassle continued it’s presence at events appearing at the Xbox Summer Games Fest in July accompanied with a free demo being made available for all Xbox users for the duration of the event. This proved very popular with 110+ sites covering the event including huge sites GameSpot, TechRadar, Jeuxvideo, GamesRadar+, Xbox Wire, VG247 and british newspaper The Sun.

A week before launch the demo was made available on Steam and Nintendo Switch which had NintendoSoup, GoNintendo, GamingLyfe and DLH.Net among the 47 outlets covering the announcement.

When August 18th arrived, the news of Helheim Hassle’s launch was covered by 110+ sites including big sites Stratege, Nintendo Everything, PlayGround and PC Games; included in the coverage was a video of the first 20 Minutes of Helheim Hassle hosted by IGN which was released a day earlier. The launch window month was spent garnering reviews from all media, in total, securing 98 reviews for Helheim Hassle. Overall the game has been a critical success on all consoles with an average metacritic score of 74, faring marginally better on consoles Switch (75) and Xbox One (73) than on PC / Steam (71). Review highlights include Pure Nintendo, Switch Player, Xbox Tavern, Video Chums, Adventure Gamers and COGconnected.

Plan of Attack secured reviews and coverage for Helheim Hassle from high quality media/influencers around the globe. Helheim Hassle was a successful campaign, with a huge number of reviews for a macabre yet charming puzzle game.