A Hat in Time

A Hat in Time is a 3D collectathon platformer developed by Gears for Breakfast, a small team that poured obvious love into every corner of it. You play as Hat Kid, a small girl in an oversized top hat whose spaceship loses its hourglass fuel, scattering time pieces across a handful of distinctive worlds. What follows is roughly six to ten hours of some of the most joyful movement in the genre, with tight controls, a surprising amount of costume-based abilities unlocked as you progress, and level design that earns its comparisons to the Nintendo classics it clearly grew up on. The world variety here is genuinely impressive for a game of this scale. One chapter sends you through a foggy mafia-controlled boardwalk town with shades of noir comedy. Another drops you on a film studio backlot run by scheming birds. The game never settles into a single aesthetic for long, and each zone introduces new rules and platforming gimmicks before the last ones overstay their welcome. The boss fights land somewhere between charming and legitimately clever, and the writing has a dry wit that trusts players to keep up without explaining every joke. Where the game earns its reputation, though, is in the feel of movement. Hat Kid has a responsive double jump, a dive, a ground-pound, and a grappling hook that all layer together in ways you figure out gradually. By the final chapters you are chaining these moves in ways the tutorial never explicitly teaches, and the game quietly rewards that experimentation. It is not punishing in the way Souls-adjacent platformers can be. It is just generous enough to keep you pushing forward without making anything feel handed to you. If there are knocks against it, the camera can be finicky in tight indoor spaces, and a couple of the later stages lean on precision that the otherwise relaxed difficulty does not fully prepare you for. The Seal the Deal and Nyakuza Metro DLC chapters are sold separately and add meaningful content, including a full online co-op hat mode, but the base game stands on its own comfortably. Players who want 100 percent completion will find the collectable scope reasonable rather than exhausting, which is a rarer quality than it should be. For players who feel like 3D platformers stopped being made with this kind of intentional handcraft somewhere around 2005, A Hat in Time is a quiet reminder that the genre can still do something warm and inventive. It knows its length. It knows its tone. It ends before it embarrasses itself. That alone makes it worth your time. Kai, Scout Team