• Price: $6.99
• Developer/Publisher: Tin Man Games
• Release Date: January 12, 2022

A review code was kindly provided by Tin Man Games. We thank them for being able to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

I was interested in To Be Or Not To Be for a variety of reasons. The game allows you to take control of the plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It looks unique and also seems like a game that would make me laugh. But as someone that has some familiarity with research-backed education practices, I was also intrigued by the idea of this game due to many students tuning out whenever Shakespeare came up.

Relevance can be hugely important in increasing student motivation. In recent years, there have been manga adaptations of Shakespeare’s works (as well as those of other classic authors). A 2021 report indicates that nearly 80% of Americans under the age of 18 game. So I love that To Be Or Not To Be tries to connect a work frequently dreaded by students with one of their interests.

I started up the game, and it offers the option for the text to be narrated. I quite like this in terms of accessibility; however, I will say that with it turned on, the text on the screen auto-advanced a little faster than I would have liked. You can also advance the text (with narration turned off) by using the touchscreen, and the game also uses dyslexic-friendly font!

To Be Or Not To Be offers illustrations and an art gallery, as well as markers to indicate which parts were in the original Hamlet so you can make your choices/changes to the story accordingly. You are able to rewind the text to make different choices when you want to see what happens with different dialogue, but it seems to rewind an entire “paragraph” of text instead of one single line like I’ve seen in most visual novels. You are able to scroll back up to see the previous text in a scene – but can only do so using the touchscreen and not with the Joy Cons.

There are also checkpoints for you to return to certain decisions, but there aren’t checkpoints for every scene, which was unfortunate. I had to button mash to skip past text I’d already read for the decisions without checkpoints. Hamlet Sr’s routes especially seemed to lack checkpoints.

I had never read Hamlet in school because it wasn’t required for the English classes I was in (😅 we did read several of his other works, though). I wanted to play through To Be Or Not To Be’s “canon” Shakespeare route first and see how well the game conveys the play’s main points before reading the original myself. (Oddly enough, I’ve been alive for several decades without having Hamlet – a centuries-old play – spoiled much besides hearing that The Lion King’s plot was similar. 😂)

After finishing the “canon” route, I then read the SparkNotes “translations” to understand the original text. From what I can tell, the game does a pretty good job at delivering the play’s plot points in modernized language.

In the game, you can choose between acting as Ophelia, Hamlet Sr, or Hamlet.

I first chose Ophelia, who is Hamlet’s love interest. Her brother Laertes comes in to make disparaging comments about her relationship with Hamlet. (The word “slut” is used, so perhaps some parents/guardians would not consider this game appropriate for teachers to use in the classroom but could allow their kids to play at home at their discretion to help get them into the Shakespeare version? The game makes it clear that the term “slut” isn’t acceptable and points out the double standards between genders, so that’s good.) Then Ophelia’s father Polonius comes in to add to the shame-fest.

The choices that allow Laertes and Polonius to enter and continue their admonishments are the options that are marked as those from the original plot. To me, this clear demarcation further reinforced the message that the way the men treated Ophelia in the original plot uses antiquated views on women and their bodily autonomy, with those dialogue options coming from a work published in the early 1600’s.

I enjoyed the storyline where I, as Ophelia, decided…“Not To Be” in Denmark (😉) and went on vacation. While I highly doubt Ophelia in the canon version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet would consider wearing a bikini (it wasn’t even invented until 1946 apparently), in this modernized version of the 1600’s she can wear what she wants and date who she wants. (This apparently extends to her bisexuality in this improved version.) Something was indeed “rotten in the state of Denmark,” so I chose to get Ophelia the heck away in that route!

I really appreciated the game’s different routes poking fun at Hamlet; some of the points made are things I hadn’t really considered after reading the SparkNotes. Some of the different storylines in the game mention technology that wasn’t invented yet (the hot air balloon, for example, was invented almost 200 years post-Shakespeare in 1783), but as this is a parody, I’ll allow it. 😂 There are interesting facts sprinkled in here and there, such as the relationship between the Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish languages.

Some of the storylines for Hamlet Sr felt a bit too similar in terms of the decisions you can make; most of the options seemed to be related to who will act to avenge Hamlet Sr’s untimely demise. I did really like that they expanded on the pirate scene that Shakespeare only mentioned in his version – like they said, who only mentions a pirate scene without giving us some sweet action scenes? 😂 (Some of the deaths could be a bit graphic and gruesome in the game’s expanded scenes, though.)

I think it might have been interesting to also have options to play from the perspective of Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother. There are brief moments where you can act as Claudius, Hamlet’s uncle, but I think seeing more from his point of view would also have been neat. Perhaps even seeing some storylines with more involvement from minor character Prince Fortinbras of Norway would have been a surprising but intriguing addition.

In some of the storylines in this game, Ophelia acts as Hamlet’s voice of reason. There’s a decent amount of the writer (Ryan North) pointing out how sexist much of the original text was. The game is good at making you consider what would have happened if Hamlet’s characters had done things differently, and also reinforces that the chauvinistic viewpoints in the original text are not acceptable.

To Be Or Not To Be also brings up Hamlet’s tragic flaw (“inaction”) and discusses how Hamlet Sr was even able to discern that Claudius killed him when he had been sleeping during his murder. (They call this “Second Person Pronoun-Paradoxical Auto-Dramatic Irony” in the game. 😂) I appreciated the game including these literary terms in the middle of the jokes.

To Be Or Not To Be is a creative way of conveying the original plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, as well as original content with absurdly amusing endings. It’s just about the same price as the paperback copy of Hamlet on Amazon, and the game is a whole lot more entertaining and intelligible for me personally. While some endings felt too similar, I felt that there were some interesting ones that made you question the logic of decisions that the characters make in the original plot of the play.

I found the experience valuable in terms of entertainment and education. I really, really like using video games as an educational tool. It appeals to me both as someone familiar with the field of education and as a gamer/consumer. I would love to see this idea expanded on in a multi-game series. Perhaps they could tackle Romeo & Juliet next? Juliet was apparently like thirteen years old – I think she needed someone like Frozen’s Kristoff to set her straight on the whole “insta-love” idea! (Ryan North apparently has published Romeo and/or Juliet in book form as he initially did with To Be Or Not To Be, so perhaps that will make its way to Switch as well? I’d love to see it!)

Switch it ON or Switch it OFF? To Be Or Not To Be really does a good job of conveying the plot of Shakespeare’s Hamlet using modernized language and social conventions. The humor occasionally misses the mark, but overall made me laugh. While the game has several endings that felt overly similar (and some that felt overly abrupt), it still does a good job of making the player think about the decisions made in the play as well as summing up some of the main points and literary devices. 7.5/10