Mr. Sun's Hatbox

I came into Mr. Sun's Hatbox expecting a lightweight indie laugh and got something I had to consciously put down at 1am. The concept reads absurd on paper - a delivery company sets up a military base of operations to recover one stolen package - but solo developer Kenny Sun built a surprisingly layered system underneath the pixel-art slapstick. The bones are a 2D stealth-action platformer, but the metagame draws directly from Metal Gear Solid V's Fulton balloon recovery system: you knock out enemies, strap balloons to them, and ferry them back to HQ to brainwash and recruit. The mission loop sits somewhere between Duck Game and Peace Walker, which is a weird sentence to type but an accurate one. The core of each run is short, five-to-fifteen minute 2D missions where objectives range from killing a specific target, to clearing a floor, to carefully extracting fragile documents. Every level is loaded with cameras, alarms, and turrets, so stealth is always on the table - but so is going loud if you have the weapons for it. And the weapons are genuinely varied: pistols, shotguns, baguettes, bars of soap, wall-piercing rifles, toy bows that fire boxing glove arrows so you preserve enemy gear. The over-50 hat selection adds another layer - hard hats block stomp damage, propeller hats give limited flight, the boxing glove hat yeets enemies across the map, and yes, the poo hat is in there. Between missions, you are back at HQ building out rooms: a med bay, a black market for buying gear, a research lab for unlocking upgrades, and a brig for brainwashing prisoners. The progression loop is genuinely compelling once it opens up. The early hours are the problem. Every character on your team starts with quirks, and most of them are liabilities - panicking on detection, fainting mid-neck-snap, bones so brittle that a thrown object sends them flying. Combine that with permadeath for every squad member and a starting HQ that barely covers the basics, and the opening sessions can feel like the game is booing you off stage. Critics flagged this balance issue consistently, and it is real. The good news is that the curve flattens noticeably once you accumulate a stockpile of hats and weapons and start leveling up survivors. The frustration-to-fun ratio genuinely shifts. Lone-wolf players get a full, solid campaign here. If you have a friend on the couch, local co-op and local PvP modes (1v1 and Last One Standing) are available, and Steam Remote Play Together covers the online gap. For a shooter specialist, the appeal is mostly in the controlled chaos - the moment-to-moment decision-making when a stealth run collapses and you are improvising with a baguette and one health point. The pixel art is not flashy, the soundtrack is fine, and the screen can get genuinely hard to read during big fights. But the systems underneath are tight enough that I kept coming back to optimize runs, theory-craft quirk combinations, and see what the research lab unlocked next. Critically, it landed at a 76 on Metacritic and a Very Positive rating on Steam, which tracks. It is not a reinvention, but for its size, it earns its time.

Fred · Scout Team

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