As a critic, you almost always inevitably face a response to your criticisms somewhere in the neighborhood of ‘Well let’s see you do better!’ As if one must first master an art rather than be a knowledgeable and experienced consumer of it to have valid criticism. You especially see these comments thrown at highly negative critics, probably along with a Molotov cocktail and a screaming honey badger. It’s pretty rare for those critics to reply simply with ‘OK, why not!?’ as Ben ‘Yahtzee’ Croshaw has done with his first ever mobile game, Hatfall ($1.99).
Sure, Yahtzee is usually criticizing console and PC games in his hit Escapist review show Zero Punctuation!, but access to those kinds of resources and funding are harder to come by than a Brit who isn’t cynical (Lookin’ at you too, Total Biscuit). So naturally, you do the best you can with what you have. Always a hobbyist game dev, this isn’t Yahtzee’s first code rodeo, but I believe it’s his first commercial game release. Gameplay wise, it’s alright, but mainly the gameplay is a vehicle to take you the funny. And the game is funny. Very funny. If you like Yahtzee’s style of humor, that is.
Yahtzee has lost his trademark hat, and it’s up to you to help him catch it, over and over again, by aligning with the falling shadow on the ground. As you go, you’ll have more imps and extremely similar looking people thrown on screen, forcing you to discern which character is Yahtzee. Other shadows belonging to decidedly more dangerous and deadly things than cranial apparel also appear, so you’ll have to get accustomed to the starting size of the shadow and the rate at which it shrinks, lest you catch a refrigerator, TV, street sign, or anvil with your head instead, only for the game to politely point out, with arrows and all, which objects were or were not hats. Oh, and you’ll get a sad violin or fart noise. And also the game will give you encouraging messages like ‘Your Parents Are Ashamed.”
Gameplay is surprisingly kind of challenging. Yahtzee seems to have coded it so that there is this fraction of a second delay to movement, and the game uses that delay to make other characters start moving at the same time as you. Sometimes no one will move at all if you don’t touch the controls. The trick is moving in quick taps to figure things out before going full tilt for that shadow. Things get even harder when you mistakenly, and frequently, catch the hat of the wizard. He is none-to-pleased by this turn of events, and to make that perfectly clear, he brings horrible biblical level plagues like raining blood or a swarm of imps to your next round of play. Survive, and you get an I.O.U. to be used upon death.
The I.O.U. is traded for a pick of a tarot card. Well… a special, Zero Punctuation style tarot card. These give you bonus hats, double hats next game, an extra life next game, absolutely nothing, or an instant wizard next game. Which is good, because late game wizard levels are nigh impossible with all the other people. And it is possible to get multiple wizards per life, and stack those benefits. You also regularly get gifts at a set interval of hats. These gifts can be used to buy things like a satellite which gives you +1 to accuracy, or a horse portrait which gives you +1 to inspiration, or a nodding dog for +1 charisma. I don’t know if these have a single solitary effect on gameplay, but other gifts definitely do. In fact, the main source of the random humor is in the gifts.
Certain gifts will activate the mini-games, which include a downhill rolling game, a survival mode hunting game, a dating sim (yes, really) and an exciting round of drunk insurance form filing (also yes, really). The rose tinted glasses and swear jar from a parallel universe have cosmetic effects on the game. The former actually rose tints the game, and the latter replaces all the text with alleged swears. If you want to see just how much this game can troll you, I’d recommend you try to discard one of your gifts. Go ahead. I’ll wait.
Oh lord, I haven’t even begun to describe the plot of the game to you. And I shan’t bother. It’s ludicrous and wonderful and barely utilized and has characters named Princess Hamflute and places called Planet Lambcrust. Think of it as… an ancillary story going on alongside Yahtzee’s much simpler one? Sure, let’s go with that. You also spend all the hats you collect on new people and imps to join you in the main game, and they’re all a joke at the expense of someone or something that Yahtzee has relentlessly mocked in his videos and articles in the past. If all of this random stuff has left you confused, sexually or otherwise, with eyebrows raised, you’ll be glad to know that you don’t have to spend any money to find out if this game is to your liking. It’s free online thanks to Addicting Games.
Here’s the rub. I like this game, I truly do. It captures the spirit and aesthetic of Zero Punctuation perfectly, it’s polished, fairly original, and it’s made me laugh out loud numerous times. But after so long, you’ll have seen every permutation of every choice in every mini-game, and then the game loses its luster, because the only thing left to do is grind out hats to unlock every character. I haven’t managed to do this yet, and I don’t even know if you get anything for doing it. Knowing Yahtzee, you’ll probably be mocked for having wasted all of that time (A likely option, considering you literally piss away your hats away when buying something). Or maybe you get to see the first ever Half Life 3 trailer, I don’t know! But even that probably wouldn’t be rewarding enough. The long term fun in this game is in the humor, not the gameplay. But once that well runs dry, there’s not much.
On top of being a two dollar game, the only way you’re unlocking every character any time this summer is with the hat doubler, which costs another dollar. The hat doubler also unlocks the last three characters, so you can’t even 100% complete the game without it. But you can just as easily experience all this game has to offer in the free flash version. It’s also just a little bit clunky, in that you can’t pause and exit a game, saving your current status. You have to die to get back to the main menu, as far as I can tell. Likewise, after getting gifts or wizard cards, the game goes straight into another round most of the time. Like I said, the game is definitely worth playing, but I don’t know if it’s worth spending the money on just to have it in your pocket. If you want to support grumpy old Croshaw, that’s cool, but as a long, longtime fan, I have doubts that Yahtzee himself wouldn’t verbally eviscerate the mobile version of his creation in fast talking review form.
