Hello Goodboy is an adventure game with easy puzzles and mini-games. The story has some important life lessons in store for you. You’ll have to play through the game 3,5x to 100%, which takes ~4h.
Approximate amount of time to 100%: 4h
Estimated achievement difficulty: 1/10
Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 3,5
Is there a good guide available: You won’t need a guide, but in case you want to look something up, I wrote this guide
Multiplayer achievements: No
Missable achievements: Not really as you’ll have to play through the game at least 3,5 times
Grinding Achievements: No
DLC-Only achievements: No
Speedrun achievements: No
Time-gated achievements: No
RNG-achievements: No
Does difficulty affect achievements: No difficulty option
Unobtainable/glitched achievements: No
Hello Goodboy is an adventure game where the main focus is the story. You play as this young boy who gets thrown into a world that is unknown to him where you’ll meet a dog that will help you along the way. You’ll meet a bunch of other characters and get opportunities to help them out as well as fix objects that were broken. Both things are done through easy-to-understand puzzles and easy mini-games that don’t have a penalty if you screw them up.
I enjoyed playing through the game and meeting all the characters, they all have in some way an important life lesson for you in store, which I won’t spoil here. You’ll learn where they come from and why they react a certain way. The game has the right length for the story to carry you through.
In a playthrough, you can only visit 2 of the 4 areas before you get through the end boss. I find this an odd choice and I think it is done to encourage people to continue with the continue+ option in the main menu after beating the game for the first time, as it is clear you only saw just half of the game, but it still felt a bit weird.
One thing I didn’t like is the way the story is told, it felt a bit childish and over-explained, but I might not be the right targetted audience. The life lessons you can get from Hello Goodboy are good for every age, but just the way the main character and Coco the dog respond felt like they talked to a young child.
For the achievements you’ll have to play through the game at least 3,5 times because you’ll have to visit every area twice. You want to repair everything in each area for 2 achievements and you’ll want to ignore everything except the choice at the end for another one. I would recommend doing that one on your third or fourth playthrough. In the settings you can set the text to instant, this will help you shorten the playthroughs a little bit.
This review for Hello Goodboy was written on 27 May 2023, based on the current Steam version of the game which has 15 achievements at the time of writing this review. This information can be outdated, for example, when the developer adds or removes achievements or releases (new) DLC.