there is something undeniably satisfying about the slow, methodical unweaving of giant spaceships into their constituent parts, and the zero-g controls that are both intuitive yet complicated enough to sometimes cause catastrophic screw ups lead to a lot of fun situations where you fucking vaporize yourself. narrative-wise, disco elysium this ain't, and everything sticks around just a bit too long to where it starts to feel like an actual job, but ultimately i think the good here edges out the bad.

finally the public is able to experience this character the way the producers of the seminal 1933 film must have intended.

people have grouped this in with gollum because they are both bad games that came out in the same year. i have thought about gollum maybe every day since i beat it 9 months ago. this game is no gollum.

that being said, i have never seen a game begin to tear itself apart at the seams while you are in the process of playing it in quite the way this one did. i had to fully quit out of the game at least once in each level because after playing for a little while kong would start to run slower, wouldn't always respond to inputs, and his attack animations would start interrupting themselves so mashing buttons would result in constant wind-ups that never actually got to the frames that start to deal damage. this is why we play.

LETTERMAN: Our next guest is the former Grand Master of the Jedi Order and current denizen of the swamp planet Dagobah. Jeez, talk about a lousy 5 year plan.

SHAFFER: You're telling me.

LETTERMAN: Ladies and gentleman, please welcome Yoda!

(Band kicks into Three Dog Night's "Joy to the World" as Yoda walks onto stage, waving. He mugs at Paul and the band for a moment like he's going to mind trick them, but his face quickly melts into a smile and he continues walking towards his chair. Lamb Chop stands from her seat and shakes Yoda's hand as he approaches, moving down a chair as Yoda sits.)

LETTERMAN: Welcome back to the show.

YODA: (solemnly) Dave...

LETTERMAN: (Chuckling) Uh-oh.

YODA: Dave, I'm not doing the voice tonight.

LETTERMAN: (Laughs) You're not the-...Not doing the voice?

YODA: I'm not doing the voice tonight.

LETTERMAN: Now, that's not-...People love the voice. Tell him, Paul!

SHAFFER: It's a great voice.

(Audience cheers)

LETTERMAN: See? See? Ah, well. If they can't convince you, I don't know what will.

YODA: Thank you all. You're very kind. Very kind.

LETTERMAN: Now, I've been hearing these rumors. Always rumors with you. Oh, he's died and become a force ghost. He's zipping around in a, uh, a...Wookiee evacuation pod.

YODA: Yeah, there's a lot of-

LETTERMAN: Can you set the record straight for once? America demands it.

YODA: (Chuckles) I have to, um-...I have to maintain a bit of an air of mystery, but I can confidently say that I am not a force ghost.

LETTERMAN: Now, that's good to hear. Not a force ghost?

YODA: No, not a force ghost.

(Scattered applause from audience)

YODA: (muffled) Not yet at least.

LETTERMAN: (Laughing) Not yet. Now, for a while there you were working alongside Galactic Emperor Sheev Palpatine.

YODA: Mmm-hmm.

LETTERMAN: What is that like? If you'll pardon the expression, I imagine two big egos like that can't help but bump up against one another every-

YODA: Well, I-...

LETTERMAN: And I mean, that's before you even factor in Ki-Adi-Mundi! Had to get contentious over there, no?

YODA: (Laughs) At times. At times. But, um, no, I really don't have anything juicy to reveal. You all know about our daring final confrontation in the Galactic Senate, but other than that we, uh, we rarely interacted outside of boring committees and the like.

LETTERMAN: Never got stuck in the elevator to the cafeteria with one another?

YODA: No, can't say so. Can't say-...Hell, we don't even eat the same kind of food.

LETTERMAN: Wow, I feel like we are learning so much about you today, Yoda.

(Audience laughs)

LETTERMAN: I'd like to learn even more, but we gotta do a commercial. Will you stick around, Yoda?

Yoda: Yeah, of course.

LETTERMAN: Great, great. We'll be right back with more from Yoda!

(Audience claps. Band begins to play)

LETTERMAN: (Muffled) Now, the Journal of the Whills...

(Segue to commercials as footage of Yoda fighting Ivy in Soul Calibur IV arcade mode plays)

(Commercials)

the only actual enjoyment i get out of this series is reading about the insane development cycles where people sacrificed their health, marriages, pets, relationships with newborn children, and grip on reality to sleep under their desks in an un-air conditioned bellevue office in the summertime and finish a game where a purple computer lady tells a space marine which hallway to walk down for deadlines dictated by burger king tie-ins, and this one doesn't even have that going for it. i understand that the multiplayer is what really made this thing the juggernaut that it is, but i feel like a lot of people have great affection for the campaign as well and i just can't see it, even if i squint and pretend it's 2007 (i was 48 years old)

as a child, 3d platformers comprised some of my most formative gaming experiences. their sprawling worlds, eccentric characters, and seemingly endless secrets were a refuge for a quiet, geeky kid like myself. now an adult loser, i was excited to play a game that attempts to recapture both the style and substance of these iconic games of my youth, but unfortunately a hat in time misses the mark on both fronts for me.

mechanically, i actually really like how it feels controlling hat kid. in particular, the 4-part jump, double jump, dash, dash cancel allows for a lot of variety while traversing and leads to some pretty exhilarating "oh shit oh shit am i going to make it" leap-of-faith style gambits. where ahit stumbles is how this toolkit interacts with the world around it. the game is plagued with odd nooks and crannies that cause the camera to get stuck at frustrating angles, geometry that arbitrarily doesn't obey the same rules as the things around it, invisible walls for any player who dares to try and open her up a bit (often requiring a reset to get unstuck), and a generally muddled sense of conveyance (find me a mario game where there are some lanterns that you can grapple and some that you can't and also they look the same). all the sharp edges sanded off by overworked japanese programmers who now have very wrought relationships with their adult children in the 3d platformers of yore are still present here and they're poking me in the eye.

the titular hat mechanic is also a bit of a letdown. none of the hats alter gameplay in as exciting a way as a mumbo transformation or a cappy capture and most boil down to a bad metroidvania's "now i can open the doors that are green". i spent the vast majority of the game with the hat that makes you move fast equipped, only switching when i came across an obstacle that required another specific hat.

(also, the title "a hat in time". it has always sounded to me like this is supposed to be a pun or something, but thinking about it now what is it a pun of? a stitch in time? a wrinkle in time? i don't get it. [docking one full star for this point])

ahit attempts to recreate the overall vibe of older 3d platformers to similarly mixed effect. the developers clearly wanted to conjure the same feeling these games gave when entering a new location or meeting a new character, but in an effort to plant their flag in entirely virgin ground have resorted to making EVERYTHING really weird. but when everything is weird, nothing is weird. the reason things like il piantissimo or cloud cuckooland stick out in my mind is because they "broke the rules" of an otherwise grounded game. ahit's world of beachside greco-russo-italian gangsters and funky penguin dj movie directors, while certainly unique, feels like a bit of a mishmash absent any more familiar landmarks of the genre (jungle level).

the game feels simultaneously too big for what the developers could handle polishing to a mirror sheen (oh you're telling me the project unexpectedly made 10x what it was asking for in its kickstarter campaign wow i didn't know that i just- you're telling me now for the first time) and too small to really evoke the same feelings as the games it attempts to mimic (only 4 real-ass full-ass levels and 40 of the main collectible [not to mention one sub collectible that becomes pointless after you collect slightly over half of them and another that unlocks purely cosmetic items and whose collection progress isn't even tracked anywhere in the UI???? {i know things with collectibles got a little out of hand towards the end of the 3d platformer's heyday, but undeniably part of the draw of these games has always been collecting a bunch of fucking schtuff. give me, like, at least 100 stuff to collect, please}])

this game makes an interesting companion to yooka-laylee. both released around the same time, had wildly successful kickstarter campaigns, and attempted to resurrect the glory days of games where one of the characters in the 6th level was a chair that had a face and was named like "chairbo" or something. they are also both not very good, but the sliders for why that is are in totally different places for each game.

Ultimately, though I wouldn't use one of A Hat in Time's shiny Time Pieces to roll back the over 10 hours I spent completing it, I find myself wondering wistfully what might have been done differently to achieve a truly tidafjkl;sdfna;sdf whatever

me, last week (naive): our struggles are many, but the uniting force of our basic humanity is the stuff of legends. working together we can do the impossible, move heaven and earth, and with our brothers and sisters the world over build a brighter and kinder future for our children and our children's children.
me, after playing palworld for 1 second: we live in a pit. a void where the light of goodness can not and will not penetrate. we crawl on the ground, our bellies dragging in the dirt, mouths filled with ash as we gaze up to the polluted sky and cry out to a god that doesn't care or doesn't exist, asking where it all went so wrong. every morning we awaken and try to move but find our bodies as if suspended in pitch, our frantic and helpless attempts to wrench free only serving to drive us deeper into the mire. our once immaculate souls, our most precious gift, have been cast onto an infernal pyre, are now charred and blackened, the detritus of an unending cosmic cyc