A Hat in Time Review for PC

A Hat in Time is a throwback to the classic 3D Collect-A-Thon platformers like Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie, but it has a few other gameplay elements to improve on the formula.

Story:

We play as an unnamed girl, but pretty much everyone calls her Hat Girl so let’s call her that as well. Hat Girl is traveling home in her spaceship, but after a Mafia man breaks a window in the spaceship, all of Hat Girl’s Time Pieces get scattered around the planet. To get home, we need to go and collect the lost hourglass-shaped collectibles.

Along your journey you meet a bunch of different characters who act as your enemies and friends. The story isn’t that great, but it serves as a great motivation to collect all the Time Pieces. Of course many of us know that in a game like this all that matters is that the gameplay is a lot of fun.

Graphics:

A Hat in Time has an absolutely stunning art design. There are five chapters and a hub world, and each environment has it’s own unique design making exploration a lot of fun. Environments range from a town, haunted mansion and forest, a mountain top and a movie studio, and a bunch more. Every chapter provides something new. Each character has a unique look and it makes them standout.

The art style is vibrant and colorful, but it’s not all great. One of the downsides is the facial expressions. It looks like they just pasted the facial expressions on the face instead of animating them, which makes them look a bit cheap, but with such a outstanding graphical design I don’t really mind this mistake.

Audio:

The soundtrack to this game is absolutely phenomenal. Each track fits the corresponding world perfectly and even if you don’t like the tracks you can unlock remixes and even those are really good.

There’s also voice acting and all of it is done really well. Every character has its own distinct voice and accent, but if you prefer to have a classic experience, there is a badge in the game that turns every voice into a mumble like in the classic platfomers.

Gameplay:

A Hat in Time is essentially the same platformer you used to play back as a child. Hat Girl controls incredibly smoothly making falling of ledges pretty difficult if you know what your doing. She moves fast enough and controls pretty easy when she is in the air. The game’s main goal is to collect Time Pieces and there are 40 in total. Other than that you collect pons which are the currency in the game. You use them to buy badges which upgrades your powers or somehow changes up the gameplay. They are also necessary for fixing relic stands and buying chapters.

One of the differences you will notice is that Hat Girl has different hats that act as different powers. Some let you run faster, one of them tells you where to go if you get lost and there are many others. It’s a cool change up and in the final chapter you will have to use every power you learned along the way to finish it.

Each chapter is incredibly different and the missions inside of them are so varied you will never play the same mission twice even when playing different chapters. Some of the missions are so cool and I wish I could talk about them more, but I think they need to be experienced for yourself.

There are also things called time rifts that are like challenge rooms where you have to traverse a level to get a Time Piece at the end of it. In general the game is incredibly vast, so you’ll be playing for a while.

Verdict:

A Hat in Time is a really good game and a lot of fun. I spent around 11 hours finishing it and I got 100% completion. I loved every minute of it. When I closed the game I really just wanted to get back to it and keep playing; that’s how good it is. If you want something to remind you of the classic N64 platformers, you can stop looking and get yourself a copy of this game.

Note: This game was reviewed with a code provided by the developer/publisher.

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