Episode 99 - Love That Neck - A Hat in Time

There’s only so many times my voice can handle podcasting like that. You’re taking the experience away from other people. Welcome back to the podcast! Today, we’re going to be talking about A Hat in Time, a 3D platformer developed by Gears for Breakfast that was largely crowd funded and even published by Humble Bundle. 3D platformers are a novelty in recent years and this type of funding really speaks to how the community that wants them is underserved, and what we got was a game that really wears its inspiration on its sleeve. With a lot of design sensibility taken from other games and references sprinkled throughout, it would be easy to call this game derivative. In reality, though, the game is very earnest and genuinely does a lot to put its own spin on the genre. We’re going to be talking about the different platforming mechanics and where they feel right and wrong, how the player movement in the game informs what level designs work the best, and we try to get Andy a job. Thank you for listening today, we had wanted to talk about this game for a while and things fell into place this time around, so I’m pretty excited to hear if any of you guys played it as well and what you thought of it, given that the genre has been in retrograde outside of Nintendo for a number of years. Next time…well, next time we’re getting started with a bigger month than we’ve had in a long time. It’s October, so we’re going to be talking about some horror games both here and over on Pocket, but next episode specifically is actually somehow really our 100th episode. We’re going to be getting JJ, Dan, Janelle and Steven back on to talk about The Jackbox Party Pack, collectively, and probably get very sentimental and nostalgic about the podcast. And before that it’s coming up on the 3rd, which, if you didn’t know, is NOCLIP day and our 5th anniversary, so we’ll have a bloopers compilation coming out then as well. And we’ll follow that up with as many horror games as we can fit in the rest of the month and maybe even bleed into November because why not? Anyway, love you all, thank you for listening, hope you have a good weekend. Have some fun.