Hat Kid must now jump, fight and stitch new hats to make her way into every nook and cranny of this new world in order to restore her fuel and resume her journey. Her adventure is halted when all her fuel, the Time Pieces, is lost and scattered across a nearby planet. A little girl and her spaceshipIn A Hat in Time you play as a tiny space-travelling girl with a big tophat. The level design is constantly inventive, the characters are charming and memorable (if very silly), and the basic act of running, jumping, climbing, and collecting colorful baubles never gets old.A Hat in Time is a cute-as-heck 3D platformer featuring a little girl who stitches hats for wicked powers. When it’s firing on all cylinders, a feat it pulls off with increasing regularity as you progress through the worlds, it’s a rival to some of Nintendo and Double-Fine’s greatest bits of design, even if it does feel a bit like a really good cover band’s imitation. At its worst A Hat in Time is merely good-a fun, workmanlike 3D platformer with a few technical wrinkles-and it’s only seldom at its worst. It’s never a major issue, but later chapters do feel better designed with regards to the camera’s limits. While usually well-behaved, it can get squirrelly in tight corners, especially in the narrow alleyways of Mafia Town. And while as much a strength as a weakness, the worlds are disconnected, with each feeling almost like a different game built around the same mechanical hooks.Īnd despite offering equally good gamepad and mouse and keyboard controls, the camera-eternal bugbear of 3D platformers, undefeated even by Nintendo-is not entirely tamed here. The first world establishes a conflict and a primary antagonist which is almost entirely forgotten right up until the grand finale, for instance. It does lack consistency in other ways, though. Where other platformers give in to temptation and use minigames or expendable single-use mechanics, A Hat in Time remains true to itself and draws strength from that conviction. Even the level framed as a murder mystery plays out as evasion-focused stealth platforming bookended by weird comedy skits, a few of which made me laugh out loud. These hidden levels are not only beautiful to look at, but some of the purest platforming challenges in the game.Ī Hat in Time never loses focus on what it is. It feels like the game itself is gaining confidence in you, and while it’s less character driven than Battle of the Birds, the central antagonist of the chapter-The Snatcher, ghostly ruler of the woods-is so enthusiastically voiced that it’s hard not to like him.Ī Hat in Time never loses focus on what it is.Ī fair number of Time Pieces also reside in hidden levels, the majority abstract platforming spaces, while a subset are Psychonauts-esque dreamscapes that offer a little more insight into the strange characters. Hand-holding is reduced, trusting you to explore and puzzle your way to a solution, clambering up trees and towers for a better view, or just to find another minor NPC to get a hint from. The Tim Burton-esque Subcon Forest shifts gears to something more akin to Banjo-Kazooie, offering you scattered objectives around a large, multi-biome haunted forest. Levels here tend to be more linear than anywhere else, but it’s all in service of telling a story, or just a good joke. Battle of the Birds recalls the best moments of Psychonauts, with character-driven humor interspersed with varied platforming challenges spread across three wildly different (if thematically linked) environments, a world apart from Mafia Island’s singular island environment. Though they’re not the mechanical peak of the game, the middle two worlds are the most colorful and memorable parts. Mafia Island may be a safe playground with tightly directed progression, but the fourth world, Apline Skyline, is a massive non-linear web of interconnected platforming challenges demanding mastery of every ability-all without a safety net and no easy goal in sight. Each world has a different aesthetic, characters, and scale. While the first Time Pieces are doled out quickly as you complete tutorial objectives, it opens up dramatically after you’ve collected a few. There’s a lot of abilities and platforming skills to learn, from a flexible wall-climbing scramble that can be chained into a wall jump, to a traditional double-jump that can be extended in mid-air with a horizontal dive.Īpline Skyline is a massive non-linear web of interconnected platforming challenges demanding mastery of every ability. After completing certain chapters or collecting enough yarn you’ll unlock new hats, each bestowing a power such as a ground-pound attack that lets you travel via marked springboards, or the ability to turn hazy green outlines into briefly tangible footholds.
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