Happy Happy Joy Joy... Wait, Wrong One

Having been delighted and infuriated in equal measure by the PSP's Harvey Birdman game this week, it seems only fitting to be equally excited and concerned over the potential for a Happy Tree Friends PC release.

Set to be a downloadable, physics-based puzzle, created alongside people who worked on the show, the question is: will it be gruesome enough? It's being developed by Stainless - one of the casual developers working on one of the recently announced Magic: The Gathering games - and published by Sega. Will Sega let it be as horrifying as the TV show? Trailer and thoughts below.

The concern is the decision to go with 3D. While the Harvey Birdman game is utterly awful, the cartoon scenes work so well because they're written by the show's writers, and drawn in the same style as the show's drawings. Happy Tree Friends aren't 3D in their cartoon, and a lot of the grisly, hideous deaths are so vivid thanks to their flat, cartoonish ways. It's hard to imagine it having the same impact in this format. But, I maintain hope. It's an excellent choice to use physics puzzles, and this indicates their minds are in the right place.

You can see above that they're still on fire, which is an important and good thing, but it just doesn't have the striking quality of the cartoon. We shall see. Game footage please Sega!