6/10
One of the more prominent creations of the short-lived era of Kickstarter-funded nostalgia-revivalist games, A Hat in Time is a 3D platformer in the vein of Banjo-Kazooie or Super Mario 64 but with modern sensibilities.
We play as Hat Girl - she's a girl, she's got hats, you get the picture. Her spaceship gets damaged and scatters her fuel, the powerful Time Pieces, across multiple different planets, requiring us to drop down into levels and complete a series of platforming challenges in order to hoover them back up. There's a lot of other influences at play here - the dorky, funny writing feels very Banjo-Kazooie, the hat crafting and powerups feel like they've been inspired by Super Mario Galaxy, and there's at least a sense of Psychonauts' unhinged weirdness to some stages.
Once you get past the set dressing though, A Hat in Time is a fairly typical 3D platformer. Unlike the golden age of platformers which inspired it, A Hat in Time is always tight to control and has a refreshing variety in level designs, ranging from linear running-and-jumping to more wide-open exploration. If it has a fault, it's that the game has a bad habit of throwing gimmicks at its player, and the boss fights are especially irritating. It's a tricky balance - when A Hat in Time is good, it’s fantastic; when it’s bad it is catastrophically annoying and risks undoing all of the goodwill it builds up prior.
A Hat in Time made me unreasonably angry at times but once the credits were rolling and I could sit back and reflect on it, I found it was easy for me to recommend it. It has some flaws, serious ones at that, but I simply cannot stay made at a game made with such heart and love and care, and one that showcases such charm.
Check out my full review! The Almighty Backlog, review #48:
https://thealmightybacklog.wordpress.com/2019/07/21/a-hat-in-time/
6