{"id":17293,"date":"2018-01-02T00:01:48","date_gmt":"2018-01-02T00:01:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/?p=17293"},"modified":"2017-12-19T07:04:47","modified_gmt":"2017-12-19T07:04:47","slug":"a-hat-in-time-ps4-xbox-one-pc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/2018\/01\/02\/a-hat-in-time-ps4-xbox-one-pc\/","title":{"rendered":"A Hat in Time (PS4, Xbox One, PC)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>\u201cYou don\u2019t see too many 3-D collect-a-thon platformers like you used to,\u201d would be a phrase I would say, but this past year alone we\u2019ve had a bit of a revival in that genre with games like Yooka-Laylee, Poi, and Super Mario Odyssey.\u00a0 And now to round things out, we have A Hat in Time as well, which looks and feels exactly like a 3-D platformer that you\u2019d find on the GameCube.\u00a0 In the game you play as a nameless girl, but we\u2019ll call her Hat Girl.\u00a0 She wears a top hat and cape and flies in her spaceship in hopes to get home.\u00a0 But along the way, her fuel falls out and scatters all over the place.\u00a0 For some reason, her fuel looks like hourglasses and has the power to change time.\u00a0 So now she must visit all sorts of crazy worlds to get her hourglass fuel back.\u00a0 The game is available to download on PS4, Xbox One, and PC, but reviewed on PS4 here.<\/p>\n

Hat Girl has all the moves you\u2019d expect a 3-D heroine to have.\u00a0 She can double jump, attack enemies, and more.\u00a0 You\u2019ll collect all sorts of goodies to help you out.\u00a0 Little round marbles act as your currency to buy levels and badges.\u00a0 You can attach badges to your hat that give you special skills, like the ability to swing on hooks with a grappling rope.\u00a0 You can also collect different types of yarn, and when you have enough, you can sew new hats to wear that give you special abilities like detecting your goals or running faster.\u00a0 The levels are quite narrative, and remind me a bit of Psychonauts (though not near as good). Once you find the hourglass in that area, you can move onto the next.\u00a0 Hat Girl\u2019s spaceship acts as your hub world, and the more hourglasses you collect, the more doors and worlds you can open up.\u00a0 You\u2019ll explore places like a movie studio, spooky forest, and more.<\/p>\n

The game has some problems that really affected my enjoyment of the experience.\u00a0 First off is the play control.\u00a0\u00a0 It just feels a little squirrely and\u2026off, for lack of a better word.\u00a0 For instance, when you slide and land on your belly, you can\u2019t move.\u00a0 You have to press jump to get back on your feet, and it threw me off more often than not.\u00a0 Plus hit detection wasn\u2019t accurate and goals and objectives were sometimes unclear. And there is a bit of a difficulty imbalance in that I could snatch up tons of hourglasses, only to take an hour to find the next one, or have to beat a super tough boss that\u2019s way harder than anything in the game up to that point.\u00a0 And on a personal note, I hate stealth missions in games, and A Hat in Time has a few and they\u2019re not very fun.\u00a0 But if you can look past these problems and really miss GameCube-style 3-D platformers, you should check this one out anyway.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Kid Factor:<\/strong><\/p>\n

A Hat in Time is rated E-10 with ESRB descriptors of Fantasy Violence and Alcohol and Tobacco Reference.\u00a0 Most of the time the game is no worse than a Mario game in terms of violence, but every now and then they put something in that parents may want to watch out for.\u00a0 An example is a Western level on a train, and you have to solve a murder by finding clues.\u00a0 You can see the owl person who got murdered with a knife in his back and what looks like blood on the floor, but once you solve the mystery, you learn that it was just a rubber knife and the murder victim wasn\u2019t dead at all.\u00a0 Another time you must infiltrate a haunted mansion and hide from the spooky lady who lives there.\u00a0 It can be quite scary!\u00a0 Reading skill is needed for the text, and younger gamers may get frustrated by the difficulty and controls.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cYou don\u2019t see too many 3-D collect-a-thon platformers like you used to,\u201d would be a phrase I would say, but this past year alone we\u2019ve had a bit of a revival in that genre with games like Yooka-Laylee, Poi, and Super Mario Odyssey.\u00a0 And now to round things out, we have A Hat in Time […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":17285,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-game-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17293"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17295,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17293\/revisions\/17295"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/17285"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.gamerdad.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}