Stock Trader Hiyo!

Hiyo: The Stocktrader is a 1-3 hourlong game about a chicken wanting to get a job. And become the richest monster in the world because .. maybe all or nothing?

If you love fun monster characters, this is the game you want to play.
If you come here for intricate management or gameplay, you are a little lost.


Humans are never mentioned again. And yes, there are quite a few missing articles and other minor errors.

It's been an entry for the IGMC entry 2015 and while I had it on my list since then .. I only now have gotten to it. Whoops.
It is a cute little mixed bag, because the introduction feels very messy and confusing, but the actual exploration and characters shine and make for an entertaining ride. It tries too hard to explain the gameplay using stock trading terms and logic, while the gameplay itself has nothing to do with the ebb and flow of the economy. There is a proper introduction to this on the gamepage, yes, but I played it without rereading it, and the game itself should deliver. This early introduction also gives the illusion of gameplay-depth (for the stock-trading part) which is not there.
It does not help that the town map is very cluttered with npcs and you really do not know where everything important is, which means you stumble around for a while. More on that later!

However, instead, there is a lovely short adventure title with different monster couplings, family dramas and quirky company relationships as you investigate the companies you are trying to buy and sell stocks of.


OH NO .. IT IS ...

Your Heroic Start

Your character is a lazy brazen rude but honest bum and decides on a whim to dabble in stock trading for a single reason: He does not need to pass any interviews to do that.
And similarily, with great motivation our character ignores the economical ramblings presented to him (at first) and dives right in!

Or not.

After the explanations presented on the stock market finished, the first thing you need to do is leave the town, and then ignore the stock markets for another hour or so.
The first thing I did was explore town. Because it is in the near vicinity and packed with creatures. You get a little bit of dialogue and it is mostly simple flavor. You can also ask them for any intel on the economy but those folks have only rarely something to tell you. There is one person though that gives you a little something.
So you get what they like or dislike, or how horrible the economy is, and how they have little of use to tell you, alright.
There are a few buildings you cannot really make use of yet and that dialogue.
You frankly cannot gain anything at this point. It is mechanically impossible, and yet you also get more pieces of tutorial on how to make money using the stock market - brainwashing the media with information you found, and also a small introduction to the loan shark and how to get loans. When you do not have any information yet to share, and no need to get a loan.

They do tell you to visit the hawk service to visit the companies in person amongst that, however, and that is what you should do. Please do. This is where I consider the actual fun of the game starts.
I first also avoided this place because there was a tiger standing in my way who could end my game this very moment (no, not the dangerous kind) by triggering an ending. You can step under his tile though, even if the wall was blocking it. I first thought I couldn't and was a little lost. But that's me, haha.

Company Climate

Like a good little chick you made your way on the back of a hawk to one of the three big companies that exist amongst monsters.
Namely, the "I Love Money Corp.", "Darkness and Co." and "The Little Piglets Company"


They have that a lot.

Each one of them is very different in business ethics, but also employees and background stories. You talk to the people there, see a lot of quirky dialogue,
collect a few items you need to progress, like finding something to wake up the person behind the counter so you get a pass to enter the building, and then do it some more.

There are small stories contained therein and you can help the companies resolve their issues - be it personal or otherwise, and at times you may also have to cooperate with other monsters.
What it creates is a mixture of completely silly, amusing and heartwarming.
Your little chick also is quite an easygoing personality himself, so it is easy to be engrossed in what's going on, although the repeated pokings at "OMG BEAUTY MUST SEE. LOOK, FEMALE!" took a little bit of time getting used to for me. It is in enough moderation though that I could grow to find it amusing.

At the same time, completing each story arc to completion also may open up more possibilities to get different endings (like, real endings) that are all collected to be watched again at the title screen.
Will you finally pass a job interview now? Who knows!

At least you now are friends with monsters! There are a lot of stereotypes but I still found joy in that simplicity and positivity. Just cut out that bunny tsundere (she's a character you meet fairly early on in the café), okay? Every dialogue line coming from her sounded the exact same. Please, have more subtlety for that one.

There are many ways to get endings and finding all of them is a great joy in this game. Be it by stuffing beggars to the brim with money or finding love with various creatures, or ending up broke, they all have their own ending scene and it is very satisfying to try to get a few more. I only know of one ending so far you could lock out by accident (.. I uh, I didn't do that!) and while I have not found all of the 15 endings I did get 8.

A little bummer is that once you have completed the company arcs, they will be static and returning serves no purpose. But since it is a fairly short game I find this okay.

And looking around like this also enables you to collect information to start making money! Yay!
So let's jump back to town and explain how that works. It turns out to be failry simple as well as quirky and amusing (for a little bit), and thankfully actually takes up little time.

Getting Money

Now that we can actually make use of town, let me elaborate what you can actually find in it.
There are 5 major buildings (I am not counting my home because there is nothing for me to do in it)

1 - the stock trading center
2 - the loan shark
3 - the police office
4 - a bar / café / casino
5 - the hawk station

The bar and police office are for news and random scenes and searching for intel.
We already went over the hawks earlier, they are like your train stations.

Loans and stocks, well, that's your money right there (no, not using it all up and just not paying it back. They react fast. Really fast. You have one or two minutes to pay it back, well isn't that a rush!)

NPCs are scattered throughout and in front of the stock trading center is a cat which is your information/newspaper handyman. AKA your golden cat. AKA your gold mine.
You can recognize them by having weird balls in their drawn character portraits, like other important characters and yourself. I am not sure what those are, to be honest. They are just there.

The prices for stock of any kind are set, the only thing changing them are the pieces of information you spread.
Which makes me wonder why they had those lengthy explanations about business in a real sense in the first place.


I wonder what those balls are. They don't seem to be Dragon Balls and I can't rip them off, either!

So you first badmouth a company by using the worst you can find. THEN buy as many of their stock by loaning 99 million gold coins, then reverse the info and spread the best info you could find on that company. Lastly immediately sell the stocks and pay the loan..
and TADA! Get rich. Now that's easy~
I played it on hard, but the basic patterns simply works.

There's two types of information you can collect, specific things like company growth that you gain as items in your inventory, and environmental information like a certain industry experiencing a setback (so something that affects everyone vs. a specific company).

You are asked if you want to combine one of those with any information you bring around/select, and you should! They simply do nothing when not applicable, and strengthen the effect when they are on-point.
They are the things you can experiment with, you can guess what they will do, but not every piece is easy to judge.
It also is fun to see how random monster go crazy over sudden news and how a complete base statement from a trusted professor lets it all calm down again. You see this in the form of newspaper articles or comments over black screen.

The only annoyance is that you do not see how much those lots you buy actually cost! And the cost is quite high and the number of zeros too, so having something akin to a shop window previewing how much money you would be spending right now would help tremendously.
You can still just guess and switch digits as needed, but you will need multiple tries and it just could be so much more intuitive.

Aesthetics

Looking at the gamepage, I actually expected a fully custom game. It is not, for certain. There is a lot mixed together and it does work quite well with the RTP and standard layout, tho it feels a little cluttered at first.
There are a few drawn character portraits and extra sprites, as well as items, but the general aesthetic with bright yellow background is reserved for the introduction.
There are few empty spaces and it all is nicely laid out, though I found only the town a little difficult to navigate at first as there are a few stairs and round-ways around a plaza. Once I got used to it, it became quite easy.

One of the more unusual aspects is how you select items. You do not have a character window or menu of any kind, instead you only have a semi-transparent bar in which your items are show-cased after a button-press.
You can select one item at a time to hold and people will react different and use it if they need it. This makes it for a very straightforward use, as NPCs also often hint at what they need in conversation. I appreciated that being the case as it lets you focus on a more natural conversation flow and not have tons of unnecessary empty interactions of "what am I gonna do with this?".
So for the money-part, you select an info block and the dialogue will change accordingly so your cat jumps in to spread it for you.
One quirk with this is, is that the interaction button in the world is still fully functional while you select an item - which means that if you stand in front of an NPC while selecting an item, you will at the same time start a conversation within that menu frame.
Thankfully it does not break or hinder anything, it simply means you need to click through a textbox when it happens.

A little gripe I have is that you cannot exit the game via this sort of menu. You have a diary to save your game with, but if you want to load or quit the game you need to do so manually.
You also have a smartphone to call people with, but you can only call the two people you knew from the very beginning, and there is no conversation to be had throughout the game. It would have been lovely if they changed (say, after one company arc had been resolved), or added more people to the list, even just for the feeling of knowing more people.

The starting screen is not particularily pretty, standing in front of three tiny houses. But it is very utilitarian and I liked being able to view all endings and having some sort of assortment for them (as in one "best" ending, and other rows)

The music is a slightly mixed bag, as the general town theme seems very .. quiet. It is some flute playing with little else and while it does suit the light-hearted tone it feels little empty compared to some of the rich tunes there are.
This is even more highlighted because I quite enjoyed all of the tunes they used! It suits the goofy and lighthearted atmosphere wonderfully and the transitions were always deserved and well-used albeit sometimes a little strong in contrast (like something really bad being on its way).

All in All

I was a little puzzled on how to rate this game. It is very flawed in many aspects, it is quite unrealistic in many things, it has very shallow gameplay depth (you can also get by just fine without doing everything perfect) but I feel it is a very solid exploration game with a lot of freedom in how situations can turn out. You may not have many choices in how to resolve an issue, but it is often unexpected and fun to see how exactly they turn out once you made those linear choices and got involved. It charmed me well and I quite enjoyed my playtime in the end.
I really enjoyed trying to find more endings and seeing more quirks and possible outcomes.

So if weird monster stories and story growth sounds fun to you, go for it!