Help a little purple dude collect and wear his fez hat and make it to the door in this single screen 2-D precision platformer.  It’s available on all current game consoles and PC, but reviewed on PS4 here.

Your goal in each single screen level is to make it to the door while wearing your hat.  You can jump and double jump, and when you’re not wearing your hat, you can do a little dash in any direction with the R button.  Once you nab your hat, you can head for the exit, but if you run under a block one step higher than you, your hat will get knocked off.  Sometimes you may not want to wear your hat so you can dash, and other times blocks will appear or disappear depending on if you have your hat on.  In later levels you may also have to collect keys to make blocks disappear so you can progress.

If you hit a spike or other obstacle you’ll lose a life, but you still retain your hat or other keys you collected.  But if you lose all your lives you’ll have to start the whole level over again.  Since everything is just on one screen, it may not seem so bad, but once you start having to collect multiple keys, it can be annoying.  And that’s really the only problem I had with this game is that it gets way too hard a little over halfway through.  But if you like these kind of ‘Super Meat Boy’ style games, you may enjoy this one, too.

Kid Factor:

Hatup is rated for Everyone with an ESRB descriptor of Mild Fantasy Violence.  If you hit a spike or other obstacle, you’ll just disappear and start back at the beginning of the level.  Reading skill isn’t needed to play, but younger gamers may find it too difficult.

Tags: Game Reviews