Released in early October, A Hat in Time has quickly gained popularity with the PC gaming world. With beginnings starting on Kickstarter, publisher and developer Gears for Breakfast has shattered their ceiling and is quickly heading for release on Xbox, PS4 and PC. Their game is a fun reminder of games such as Mario 64, Crash Bandicoot and even Sonic.
Jump right in to a colorful world and play as a girl with a big top hat. Her official name is Hat Kid and she travels through space. Upon her adventures, Hat Kid has a catastrophe with her ship and loses everything on board such as her fuel which is controlled by how many time pieces she has. She is stranded on a nearby planet and has to scour the entire place in order to replace everything lost. On the way she runs in to some unsavory characters like mafia cooks, birds and some shadows. Hat Girl must use her skills to jump, fly, swing and solve mysteries in order to find all of her ship’s pieces.
One of Hat Girl’s main characteristics that gets her through the game is her skill of creating new hats. Unlike Mario from Super Mario Odyssey, Hat Girl can stitch her own hats and use the power from those hats to do new things. Along with this, she can collect decorative buttons to put on the hats too. Some hats allow the ability to look through to other dimensions while others allow Hat Girl to cook things that explode. The possibilities are almost endless in this game.
The play space in A Hat in Time is massive and very entrancing to look at. Some areas have snow, some are jungle and some are cities. Gears For Breakfast has said that A Hat in Time has up to 5 different worlds to explore, but it feels like there is almost triple that amount.
These types of games that are reminiscent of older creations is a calling to the kids that are now grown up. Eventually everyone wants to go back to the fun parts of their past and this is a way to do so. A Hat in Time reminds me of Spyro in a way, a game that I found fun when I was growing up. The platforming is similar and so are the looks which make this game fun to fall in to. As games are created in mass numbers, only one question is left. How do these types of games fit in to the changing world?
Games are all over the place when it comes to difficulty, for example, Cuphead is known for being extremely difficult. While there are many games to choose from, A Hat in Time may be looked at as old and easy, however, there is still a place for this type of game among all of the others. For the aging gamers, we want a game that is full of adventure and progress, this is what kept us interested when we were young. And now, we enjoy the challenge of hard games and their puzzles, but we still crave the ability to have a good story and still make decent progress without a game being too difficult.
If you want a fun take on the platformer experience, A Hat in Time is the game for you. Just be warned that after playing it for hours and trying to find all the secrets, you might have a sudden urge to revisit some of the games that inspired it.
A Hat in Time is available now on PC and will be on Xbox and PS4 December 8