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Perusing the spectacles of PAX East 2025, there was plenty I found to be completely alien. Roguelikes, deck-builders, anime cosplayers - all these were outside the realm of my experience. But when I came across HANK: Drowning on Dry Land, I found familiarity. Here was an action game revolving around a scrappy masked hero, one who reminded me of folks like Daredevil, the TMNT, and of course, of Batman. And after a thorough chat with the game's creator and designer, I learned that that was exactly the intent. 

"We grew up watching cartoons like Batman the Animated Series and Batman Beyond," says Kuba Lisiński, HANK's co-creator and founder of My Next Games, "So we wanted to create an animated episode that you can actually play. We created this superhero, Hank, who is basically Batman but he's always drunk and he can time travel." (Quick side note here - Lisiński agrees with yours truly that Batman Beyond is, in fact, "the best Batman out there.")

"Everything we do in the game tries to look like an animated series," Lisiński continues, "Like a hand-drawn thing. [Co-creator] Witek is actually a comic book artist, so we try to take his style of drawing and create the pipeline, the rendering to bring his art and the style of his drawings to the 3D space."

So if Batman: The Animated Series is the inspiration for the game's visuals and its main character (sort of), you'd expect that the gameplay would be similar to an Arkham Asylum or other superheroics-driven game. But unlike The Caped Crusader's games, it's not Hank's physical prowess that drives the action.

"The game works like this," the developer tells me, "You can manipulate time. Tou can speed it up you can rewind the game, like videotape, going back to the '90s [theme], so you can fix your mistakes. The other power is 'timejump.' Hank performs a timejump, meaning he goes back to the beginning of the adventure like going through a mirror. Now there are two Hanks out there - the one that is doing everything up to the point of the timejump, and the one coming out of the mirror at the beginning of the adventure. Now, you can go do different stuff; you can be at two places in the same time. "

"It's basically a co-op game with yourself from the past," Lisiński continues, "What you can do is have one being chased by [a monster] and he's bait. Then, you can use him to place the monster in a proper place and manipulate your environment to kill him. You can not only do that once, but you can do it two, three, four times."

It's a pretty neat power, but it comes with a cost. "You have to be careful," Lisiński tells me, "Because the more you time travel, the more Hanks there are on the map. And you cannot meet yourself in the past, because if you do, it will cause a paradox. So it's harder to move around. You have to play a sneaking game with yourself from the past."

Don't get the wrong idea here; you are not playing against yourself as Hank in the game that bears his name. There's a certified villain in this story, The Unraveler, and just like Hank, his inspirations come from Batman: The Animated Series as well. But also like the drunk, time-traveling Hank, The Unraveler's inspiration is also heavily tweaked. 

"The Unraveler is inspired by the Joker," says Lisiński, "But we didn't want him to be the Joker exactly. He builds plans that work like a clockwork machine. He composes chaos, rather than act as chaos itself. So Hank is his natural enemy because Hank time travels. He can rewind and do stuff that, from the outside perspective looks only like the perfect solution to The Unraveler's plans. This guy who is basically drunk all the time appears on the scene, and this plan that [Unraveler] put so much work into suddenly goes to pieces. ANd it drives him mad."

As of this writing, HANK: Drowning on Dry Land has not been given a release date, although Lisiński tells me that the game (which he describes as "the first chapter" of a longer story) is looking at hitting shops in 2025. In the meantime, however, gamers who are interested in the concept or who, like Lisiński, grew up on Batman: The Animated Series can access a prototype of the game, entirely free of charge. That prototype is Hank: Straightjacket, and it's available for download via the link. Check it out, why don't you?

Just maybe don't you be drunk while playing.

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