4.5/5 ★ – pinksteady's review of A Hat in Time.

A vibrant tribute to old-school 3D platforms I have a love-hate thing with platformers. I generally can’t stand the 2D variety, but the odd one catches me (I really enjoyed The Fall, for example). I couldn’t even finish Unravel which was gorgeous if nothing else - I seem to have a very low tolerance when it comes to the obligatory frustrating puzzles or manoeuvres that require endless deaths and retries. I’ve fared better with 3D platformers, and in fact I count Psychonauts as one of the best games I’ve ever played. And in fact by this point these games are closer to 3rd person adventure games, just with a more predictable set of mechanics. ANYWAY... A Hat In Time channels all the old 3D platformers we’ve all known and loved (and sometimes hated)... Super Mario 64/Galaxy springs to mind, as does Banjo Kazooie and, as mentioned, Psychonauts. And I’m pleased to report... it does it really well. It gets the balance of the various elements just right; it utilises a variety of traditional aspects of the genre while introducing enough charm and character of its own to give it its own identity. Unlike times when I feel I’m just going through the motions in a game, I really connected with the experience playing A Hat In Time - playing it simply made me feel happy. It wants you to have fun, and that is an increasingly rare commodity in gaming these days. It is also dials down the infuriation factor - I only had a couple of die-and-retry-ad-infinitum moments. What I really appreciated was the artful way that a particular scenario would be encountered that would make me think “oh god here we go”, but the game was self-aware enough to inject something unexpected to either help me or shake this perception. I think that’s all I have to say about it really. I’m not into doing reviews, so I’ll leave the dissection and description of all the various aspects of the game to, well, everyone else :) Suffice to say, I really enjoyed it, it does the genre justice, offers a refreshing, positive and uplifting gaming experience and is worthy of your attention. Hey, my 3 year old loved watching me play it, so it must be doing something right!