Review: Hatfall

Hatfall is the 2015 official “hat-putting-on” simulator created by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw, the fast-talking Anglo-Australian behind the Zero Punctuation gaming review webseries. Developed by Yahtzee himself and Addicting Games, it started out as a free-to-play flash game on the Escapist website but was later released as the Hatters Gonna Hat edition on Steam, Android and iOS devices.

You as the player take control of Yahtzee’s little cartoon character against the typical bright yellow backdrop - and must use either a controller, the arrow keys or a mouse to move him left and right in order to collect the falling trilby hats from above. This is complicated by having several (sometimes often identical) other characters on-screen at the same time, leading to you having to work out exactly who you are controlling before positioning yourself. Also, the trilbys aren’t the only thing raining down from above - often there will be telegraph poles, street signs, televisions, fridges and cars that will impale or crush you respectively and put an end to your current streak.

The gameplay is heavily arcade-inspired and relies on the typical high-score system. Each “level,” if you like only takes several seconds to complete, and the successful catching of each hat will cause the gameplay speed to increase, more obstacles to fall and more NPCs to appear on-screen. The standard arcade-style gameplay is often broken up however by a number of unique mini-games - all of which involve poking fun at a specific gaming trope or genre of video games and naturally is doused in Yahtzee’s own abrasive and often dark humour.

Speaking of Yahtzee’s humour - the loading screens, menus, options and even pause screens all include regular nods to his work, including his typical British profanity, catchphrases and references. The NPCs also are a throwback to many of his reviews, characters such as the imp, “your mum,” and the leather-clad gimp will often show up to distract you from collecting more hats. The more hats you collect, the more of these NPCs you can unlock using the shop menu. You will also earn regular “presents,” several of which are just cosmetic or simply for novelty use, such as changing all of the loading screens to streams of constant profanity and censored text, or giving the screen a most distracting rose-tinted hue - but the vast majority of them are used to unlock the mini-game segments.

Unlocking “survival mode,” throws you into a weird tycoon-style management game in which you must make decisions as the new boss of a woodland company to increase the company’s stock of acorns. Collecting both “pictures of a horse” unlocks a mode that pokes fun at turn-based RPGs, in which Yahtzee finds himself stuck at a boring engagement party and every time he encounters an annoying person at the buffet table, must “fight them off” in the style of a random encounter battle. “Wonderful Headgear Romance” is a mockery of Japanese visual-novel style dating simulators, in which you play an unseen protagonist and attempt to seduce Hat-chan, by taking her on dates to the fairground, dog walking or you may choose to violate her immediately…

Another recurring character is “the wizard,” who will become “angered” whenever you catch a wizards’ hat on your head instead of a trilby. This causes one of a number of different effects, including covering the floor in slippery “blood rain,” which massibley reduces traction, covers the screen with a downpour of imps or flips the screen upside-down and reverses your controls. Upon calming down, the wizard will grant you one of his “boons,” which you can redeem at the end of every run - taking the form of drawing a random tarot card. These boons can grant extra lives, double your score, add more hats to your collected total or simply insult you and offer nothing as a booby prize.

To anybody who hasn’t watched a Zero Punctuation review, Hatfall will seem like a semi incoherent game with aspects seemingly thrown in at random - but to long time viewers or fans of Yahtzee Croshaw, Hatfall is both amusing and addictive. It’s the epitome of a casual or pick-up-and-play game that is common to Steam and mobile devices, but is differentiated significantly by the liberal sprinkling of humour. Personally, I could only play it for 20-40 minutes at a time before I’d get frustrated due to missing a hat or picking the wrong wizard boon - but it’s a fun little time-sink and comes with appropriately amusing and insulting achievements. It costs £3.99 on the Steam store, perhaps slightly more than the average casual game on there, especially during sales - but if you’re a long-time fan of Zero Punctuation, I highly recommend it.