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dkirschner's A Hat in Time (PC)

[November 11, 2019 07:21:08 PM]

Wow, this was a surprise hit. 3D platformers generally aren't my thing, but I adore A Hat in Time. This is the best of this genre I've played since the two Super Mario Galaxy games. The game has very positive reviews, but I still had it pegged as "too kiddie" or "meh 3D platformer not as good as Super Mario Galaxy so who cares." Neither of these is true! It might have a cartoony art style, but it's function is more cuteness and humor.

This gist of the story is as follows: You, Hat Kid, are flying home in your spaceship when you have an accident and all of your time pieces (like fuel) fall to the surface of the planet below, scattering to the different places there. You need to go recover you time pieces so you can get home. Not easy! There's another kid, Mustache Girl, who wants to get rid of all the bad guys. When you don't immediately help her, she vows to crush you. You proceed to go world by world collecting your time pieces, leading toward a final confrontation.

The worlds are really creative! The first one is Mafia world, which is populated entirely by big, stupid mafia men. They like to punch things and keep it simple. Sets the tone for the game. The next world is Dead Bird Studio, where two birds (a wild-west owl and a disco penguin) compete to make the best movie and win a film award. Naturally, you star in both of their films and uncover a sinister plot while doing so. Then, probably my favorite, was the graveyard level because of the boss. You sign your soul away to this Oogie Boogie type character, who makes you do tasks for you and eventually tricks you! He was definitely my favorite character. The fourth world was a strange one. In every other world, there are "acts" that you complete in order, but in the fourth world, Alpine something something, you get to free roam. There are a handful of time pieces, but you explore the world without much structure to find them all. I appreciated this change of pace, but the conclusion was unsatisfying. The characters in the world didn't have as much personality as previous worlds, which made the exploration less exciting. The final world is...well, you'll have to play to see that one.

The main mechanic of the game involves equipping different hats with different abilities. The basic hat points you toward your objective. There's one that lets you sprint, another that lets you toss bombs, another that lets you see previously invisible platforms, and so on. Then you pin "badges" onto your hats, which give you still more abilities, such as the ability to shoot a grappling hook. That one is absolutely necessary, while others are optional. Some of the hats are like this too. There's a final hat that I never crafted that (probably) lets you stop or rewind time. There are also other (useless?) badges you can buy. You can switch between hats on the fly and easily equip different badges to suit the situation.

My one gripe with the game is, as with most 3D platformers, the platforming. That has to be tight! The controls here were definitely good, just not great. Hat Girl especially has this annoying habit of hopping when you land from a jump, which makes it unnecessarily tricky to jump multiple times in succession. This made avoiding moving obstacles difficult at times. I was able to abuse her getting stuck on walls to get higher, and then other times it's difficult to judge distance for jumping. Platforming could be mildly frustrating.

Anyway, I'm definitely surprised by how excellent the game is. If you like 3D platformers at all, you need to play it. It's a relatively short one (took me ~12 hours), and you could easily sink some more in to collect every time piece. I finished with 26/40, which is the minimum required!