Release Date: 18 October 2019
Date Played: 21 May 2022
I saw one review online that described A Hat In Time as, "a beautiful mess." Despite my best efforts, I can't think of a more apt way to describe this game. It's full of extreme framerate drops into the single digits, sub-par graphics, tons of texture pop-in, wonky and slippery controls, an incredibly frustrating camera, game crashes, and near game-breaking bugs. But, despite all of that, it has so much variety and charm that it manages to overcome what would normally be a nail in the coffin for most other games to present itself as not only an above average game, but also a must play. In the last 20 years of gaming, I can only think of one other game that was so broken and janky that it should have been relegated to obscurity but managed to win over the hearts of most of the people that put in the time to appreciate it. That game was Deadly Premonition.
Story:
You play has Hat Kid, a little girl who is trying to return to her home world on her spaceship. After passing over a planet, the Mafia comes to collect a toll and Hat Kid refuses to pay. In retaliation, the Mafia bust open the spaceship's time vault and all of the hourglasses (the ships fuel) spill out over the world below. You have to travel around the planet's four areas collecting time pieces by completing various tasks. These different areas are locked behind a minimum number of hourglasses, a la Mario 64's stars. With 25 hourglasses required to finish the game. Along the way, you'll make many friends and enemies. You'll complete tasks for the Mafia in their beach-front, tropical themed world, help make several movies in a bird themed version of Hollywood, sell your soul to the devil in a haunted forest and mansion, and platform your way over perilous crevasses and tricky puzzles in an alpine themed stage. Obviously, the game is not only quite zany and silly, it's also quite varied. The characters you meet are fantastic and have some very funny dialog. There are some campy bits, but it just adds to the abundance of charisma that the game has. Every stage feels very different and unique and is one of the game's best features.
Gameplay:
A Hat In Time is a 3D platformer. Which, if you've read any other my other reviews, you'll know is not a genre that I'm very fond of. So, to say that this buggy and wonky game won me over is a huge complement on its behalf. As mentioned above, the game's 4 stages all play very differently. The tropical Mafia world plays like a 3D collectathon style game in a sandbox type environment, the Hollywood stages are more focused on stealth and investigation, much of the haunted forest area plays almost like a survival horror game, and the alpine section is straight up white-knuckle platforming. The game can be a bit challenging at times, but dying is never to much of a setback and you're always able to jump back in at the most recent checkpoint. Of course, most of these area's are split up into different levels that will have you performing various tasks and challenges. They all really feel different and the game does a good job of never really letting itself get into a lull where you feel like you're doing the same things over and over again.
Hat girl can double jump, wall climb, dash, attack, crawl, and all of the other things your would expect to be able to do in a 3D platformer. While you do finally get the hang of the controls and the camera, a lot of the time, the controls feel slippery. You'll constantly miss platforms, overshoot your landing, come up short, wall-jump when you don't want to, and fight with the camera that loves to swing around right at the last second and makes you miss your landing. It can be extremely annoying at times, and I didn't really feel like I had the hang of controlling Hat Kid until about 75% of the way through the game. Once I did though, the game became much more enjoyable to play. Luckily, the tougher platforming sections are reserved for the end of the game and are opened to you at the perfect time. If there was some more serious platforming towards the beginning of the game, I'm not sure I would have stuck it out and seen Hat Kid's adventure to the end.
To help out Hat Kid, you can collect balls of yarn scattered around the various stages. This will allow her to craft a new hat that comes with a new set of abilities. One lets you run faster, one lets you explode walls, another reveals hidden platforms, one lets you jump to hidden areas, etc.. You can also unlock badges to put on your hats to give them additional bonuses. These can be mildly beneficial while you play but aren't required to progress. These different mechanics give the game a bit of a metroidvania feel as some areas are inaccessible until you've gained an ability to reach it. You'll have to come back and revisit old stages once you've unlocked a few hats. Some required storyline chapters require specific hats. So, you'll have your progress halted a few times where you have to go visit a different area than the one you're currently working on in order to get some yarn to craft the hat you need. It's not too bad, but I wish the game explained this better. At one point, I was playing through an area of the game and was given a notification that I couldn't progress anymore. I had no idea what to do and had to look online to figure out what was going on. Apparently, you're supposed to go on to the next area of the game to unlock a new hat, then come back later to finish off the previous area. A bit esoteric, but not a grievous sin.
There are also some really awesome platforming challenges that you can unlock by finding hidden warps in the 4 areas of the game. So, be on the lookout for those. But, make sure you don't jump into one while you're in the middle of completing another objective during a stage, because once you enter the warp, you'll lose any progress you've made on your current mission.
Presentation:
A Hat In Time looks like a Playstation 2 game. I'm not sure if this was on purpose and trying to cash in on the retro look, or if the developer just didn't know how to do any better. It looks pretty bad, to be honest, and I have a pretty strong tolerance for older looking games as I mainly play retro stuff. Luckily, all of the fantastic art design and little details scattered around the game once again make up for its short comings and allow it to rise above the sum of its parts. Cute touches like the Roomba that wonders around the spaceship, the fantastic artwork on the title screen of each level, the character's cute mannerisms, and the remarkable humor of the game puts such a big smile on your face that you're more than willing to overlook the shoddy graphics and the insane amount of texture pop-in.
To top it off, the game has a stellar soundtrack that once again elevates it. It's catchy and can be either very calm or exhilarating when it needs to be. My daughter and I both found ourselves humming along to the music whenever we were playing. She said that it was her favorite music in a video game ever, and considering she played Mario Odyssey not that long ago, that's a pretty huge complement.
As I mentioned earlier, the game is a mess in terms of its technical presentation. There are spots where the game drops into a single digit framerate. This often coincides with some of the more epic, and difficult, set pieces that are thrown your way and will almost guarantee that you die because you can't see what's going on or control your jumps. At one point in the game, in the haunted mansion at an especially tense point, I had to sneak into a room and solve a puzzle to get a key while being chased. Every time I walked into the room, my entire screen would glitch out and I would only be able to make out what was going on in the very bottom right corner of the screen. It was almost game breaking. I had to watch a playthrough of this section of the game, and then just jump around until I got lucky enough to solve the puzzle. It was almost like playing the game blindfolded. What should have taken about a minute ended up taking over an hour. There were also many times that the camera rotated when I wasn't expecting and caused me to miss my jump. It was a constant struggle fighting against this camera, and once I decided to play with its settings in the options, it became better, but not good by any means.
Conclusion:
A beautiful mess... That's really the best way to sum up this game. It's just so charming, fun, varied, cute, interesting, and well thought out that it's impossible not to love. It's really hamstrung by all of its technical problems and it's substandard controls and if these weren't an issue, this game would be one of the best 3D platform games ever made. You know all of the beloved games that RARE made on the N64. Games like Conker's Bad Fur Day, Donkey Kong 64, Banjo Kazooie, etc.? All those games that everyone loves, right? Well, not me. I have never enjoyed playing any of those... and I LOVED A Hat In Time. I'm really taken aback that this game is so good that it not only overcame its shortcomings to be awesome, but it also made ME overlook my aversion to 3D platformers and reconsider my opinions of them. I wish I could say that it would like me appreciate them more, but it's just so good that it might make me be more harshly critical towards them. Yeesh... only time can tell.
You owe it to yourself to try out this one. Yes, you'll have to work for your enjoyment at times, but it's more than worth it.
Final Status: Beaten
Final Score: 8/10
