Slinky Productions have taken the classic game of Hangman, locked it in a room with a film collection, a bottle of wine, and some oysters and just left it to do what comes naturally. The spawn of this bizarrely romantic evening is Slinky Productions’ Movie Hangman.
Hangman has been around for over a hundred years. The Victorians apparently recognised the need to relate public execution with phrase ambiguity. Though in reality this would have been an odd gesture for anyone, especially the Victorians…
“We will build a gallows in front of you, and remove the various parts of your body and hang them up until you are dead, unless you can guess the letters that comprise the famous phrase, song or book I am thinking of. If you do this we shall let you go free albeit with any number of missing limbs and in all likelihood a missing head.”
Hmmm, well that being said. It’s still a popular game today, I think partially because you don’t need much to be able to play it, just a piece of paper and something to write with. Movie Hangman is played from a browser so it’s almost following in the footsteps of the original in that you don’t need anything fancy to be able to play it. Unless you don’t have a computer, then you’ll need to buy one of those but that is probably a little much to spend, in which case I’d recommend buying a pen and some paper and go old school.
For those who don’t know the rules of Hangman, I’d advise you to find out about fire and the wheel before reading on, just so you have the basics of civilisation. For everyone else, I’m going to get to the review part of this review as I think the waffle part is suitably padded out now.
There does appear to be a lot of films in the database. I’ve been playing on and off for most of the day and I haven’t had a duplicate yet, which is a good sign. Some of them are pretty easy and some of them I haven’t even heard of, so there’s a good mix. Each game of Movie Hangman has a clue to help you on your way to guessing the film, but these are not overly helpful until you have some letters. The clues are along the lines of ‘Horror (2003)’ or ‘Romantic Comedy (1986)’. There is a taglines edition of Movie Hangman that will give you the tagline for each movie as a clue, if you did want to head in that direction.
The one downside is that there isn’t a two-player option. Then again maybe in this case it wouldn’t work, as it would either have to be played as an open game of Hangman or you’d have to qualify your entry against a list of given films. Ok, in retrospect two-player option might not be such a good idea, but seeing as the original game of Hangman is very firmly in the two-player camp it seemed a little odd to not have this option.
To sum up, Movie Hangman is everything you would expect it to be. You can access it and play it really easily through your browser, though I found it not quite so easily played on my iPhone as I had to scroll to see the whole screen and the letter keys are a little on the small side. None of the above is any problem if you’re playing on a computer, that all works fine. There’s a surprisingly large selection of films to keep you guessing, and you can brag your points across the various social media platforms, if you were so inclined.
Honestly this game is not going to get interest of ‘Call of Duty‘ proportions, but it doesn’t have to. It has enough playability to keep you entertained while you’re on the phone, listening to hold music, or half watching TV. Sometimes that’s all you need.
If you want to give Movie Hangman a go you can get to it by clicking on this link.
