LogFAQs > #950143232

One more to wrap up January...

A Hat in Time (Switch)
Sooo, based on how this board had spoken of this game in the past, I was expecting a masterpiece. I... didn't get that. I sure do have a lot of thoughts, but let's start with the good. I love how this was clearly a throwback to N64/PSX/Game Cube/PS2 era 3D platformers. The style, level design, characters, even animation were all reminiscent of those times, while looking just crisp enough to be on new platforms. The level design was great. Honestly, it reminded me a lot of Super Mario Sunshine (and I don't just mean the Time Warp levels, but the influence is particularly blatant in those), and, despite my gripes with the game that I will get to, I will probably recommend this to a friend who really, really loves that game. The music was fantastic. As a music lover, this is always a huge plus for me in any game I play, but particularly in platformers it seems to affect me the most. The humor was spot-on. It wasn't laugh-your-ass-off hilarious or anything, but I really appreciate when a game (or really any piece of media, but especially a game) can so pointedly and deliberately not take itself seriously. The characters, dialogue, and scenarios were so ridiculous that the game didn't just serve as a throwback to early 3D platformers; it was practically a parody of them. Mustache Girl, The Snatcher, DJ Grooves and The Conductor were all great, memorable characters.

And now for the bad. The first time I tried to play this game, over a year ago, I started to feel sick very early on (after just five hourglasses). I didn't really think the game was the cause, but because of an almost Pavlov-like reaction, I didn't go back to it. I restarted for this run through and once again, I started to feel sick very quickly. This time I figured it was the game, so my first thought was to turn down the brightness, which helped. So yeah, I had to turn down the game's default brightness to play it without getting sick. Great start. Technically, the game was a mess. The camera sucked. I have no idea how you can mess up a free-roaming camera on a 3D platformer in 2017, but they friggin' did it. The physics, specifically Hat Girl's interactions with objects, terrain, and enemies, were weird. It made it difficult for me to pull off the type of precise acrobatic maneuvers that I'm used to pulling off in, say, a 3D Mario game. These two things combined led to a lot of deaths that I really didn't feel were my fault. Lots of graphical glitches too. This, combined with the bad camera and wonky physics, made for an experience that felt very unpolished. Was that intentional, being a throwback to older games? If so, I didn't like it. A lot of the hourglasses were way too long for just a single hourglass. Murder on the Owl Express comes to mind (even though I loved it), but the biggest offender was the Alpine Skyline, which was just way too big and way too long for its own good. The Disease Has Spread was particularly annoying, basically having to go through the whole giant level all over again for one more hourglass. Oh, and in that level, it didn't autosave after every hourglass like it had done the entire game up until that point. You had to exit the level in order to save. This wasn't made clear to me and I shut the game off after getting two of them, and came back to find the level untouched. This frustrated me so badly that I put the game down for a week. Real nice.

Overall, while I'm glad I played it, I was a bit disappointed and didn't get the experienced I expected and hoped for going in. I can absolutely see what they were going for. There's something there, and even as it is there was plenty of good, but there were just too many flaws and the end result was a game that just didn't quite click as well as it could have. If they had just ironed out the creases, I think this really could have been an all-time stellar 3D platformer. Instead, it's just okay.

---

darkx
Games beaten in 2021 - 9; Most recent - A Hat in Time