The only truly lamentable thing about A Hat In Time is that it’s too short. I completely understand that Gears for Breakfast excreted enough of their blood, sweat, and tears into the four levels that were in the game, but the minuscule amount of content still left me unsatisfied. I soon forgot that we lived in the age of downloadable content, so there was a slight possibility that my hunger for more A Hat In Time would be satiated. Unfortunately, Gears for Breakfast unloaded the dessert wine from A Hat In Time’s main course onto the bourgeois PC gamers and left us console peasants out to dry. That is, until sometime within the past year when Gears for Breakfast finally graced console players with the A Hat In Time DLC. Seal the Deal, the first of the two DLC content packs, is a hybrid of the rhyming words in the title: seals and deals. With double the content that usually comes in a DLC package, one would assume Gears for Breakfast would be spoiling us. However, Seal the Deal is not the bountiful gift that properly extends A Hat In Time.

The first portion of this DLC is the “Deal” section. After defeating The Snatcher and acquiring a certain number of timepieces in the base game, he’ll make himself comfortable at the top of Hat Kid’s pool of pillows for the rest of the game. Of all of the colorful characters in A Hat In Time to make permanent residence in Hat Kid’s ship, The Snatcher might inspire feelings of anxiety. Once you speak to him, the player learns that he’s here rather than inspires feelings of frustration. The “Deal” portion is a roughly designed map integrating each of the game’s four main chapters with some vague sense of interconnectivity. The snatcher-colored blobs that cover this map are challenge missions, more difficult versions of missions from the base game. The challenge missions have more elements that can damage you, and the boss fights are more hectic and ferocious. Once you complete the challenge, more challenges will open on the connecting threads of the map. Completing these challenges will also net Hat Kid with a few new color pallets and costumes.

I’ve never really been enticed by challenge missions in video games, and “Seal the Deal” is no exception. I’ve always found instances where the player is forced to replay sections of the game with a caveat or handicap to feel artificially difficult. Getting out of bed in the morning is a simple, easy task that mostly everyone does every day of every week. If I had to hoist myself out of bed with only my pelvic muscles and still had to land on my feet once I got up, the task would be incredibly taxing. The challenges in “Seal the Deal” are familiar, simple tasks with incredibly tedious conditions. The base challenges are fine, but it’s the bonus requirements for each challenge that make “Seal the Deal” insufferable. The conditions of the bonuses are insanely harsh, with some of them requiring borderline exploitation of the game’s mechanics. One would assume that the bonuses for these challenges would be optional, but they must fill out the entire map. There is a “peace and tranquility” mode to soften things up, but enabling this will only count as a demerit. The difficulty of A Hat In Time never came up in my review because it was never a concern. The game had a perfect difficulty curve. “Seal the Deal” takes the base game and turns it into a frustrating nightmare, complete with constant taunting from The Snatcher to add insult to injury.

To be frank, I expected another full episode from A Hat In Time’s DLC content. That’s what the “Seal” part of the title alludes to, referring to the abundant amount of seals that work on a luxurious cruise liner manned by gruff walrus. Unfortunately, developers had the “Deal” part of this DLC pack eclipse the chapter section. There are only three chapters, and none of them really hold to the standard I’ve come to expect from A Hat In Time. The first chapter is a mere introduction to the cruise ship as a setting. Hat Kid collects timepiece shards around the ship for the player to become familiar with the different areas. The player will have to memorize each section of the ship for the next episode, the most difficult, non-challenge mode episode in the game. I don’t know if the person reading this has ever worked a short-staffed day in a restaurant or retail, but the second chapter here is exactly what it feels like to work in that hectic environment. Hat Kid has to deliver over 20 different items to the patrons of the ship under a short time limit. Apparently, Hat Kid is obligated to this because the cutesy seal staff that all talk like Bubbles from the Powerpuff Girls is all incompetent. I usually don’t condone violence against animals, but this chapter makes me want to fashion Hat Kid’s umbrella into a club and slaughter all of them in frustration. This chapter conjures up too much real frustration I’ve experienced in real life. The last chapter is a Titanic-Esque iceberg shipwreck where Hat Kid has to save everyone on the ship from drowning in the frigid drink. Like the climax of the base game, this epic finale feels undeserved. This time, it’s because there are only a mere two chapters supporting it.

I waited many years to get my hands on more content from A Hat In Time. Judging from what I experienced in “Seal the Deal”, I should’ve been more careful about what I wished for. The base game of A Hat In Time wasn’t very challenging, but it didn’t have to hold my attention. In “Seal the Deal”, the difficulty is amplified to biblical proportions, and the entire game suffers as a result. I wish the developers would’ve taken the time to expand the “Seal” portion, and maybe the part that I hoped for wouldn't have been underwhelming.

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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com