A Hat in Time - Vanessa's Curse

Add every dimension up and A Hat in Time is a game with clear flaws and a virtue rare enough to forgive them. It is no flawless masterpiece — the dated visuals, the short main story, the launch bugs are all real. But in the 3D collectathon, a genre PC players were starved of for the better part of a decade, it turned in the most convincing answer the platform has seen in years.

A tiny studio proving Nintendo does not own the genre

Pin it to 2017 and the coordinates get clearer. That was the year Super Mario Odyssey landed, the genre's reigning giant flexing in its prime. And right there beside it stood A Hat in Time — a crowdfunded project from Gears for Breakfast, a studio small enough to count on your fingers — holding its ground and proving that a third-party indie can do this old genre at a top-tier level too.

Commercially it is a textbook success story: past half a million copies in early 2018, past a million by year's end, and roughly 1.92 million across platforms after that.

For a team that started on community goodwill, that number carries weight — and it doubles as a message to the industry that PC's appetite for great 3D platformers never went away, it just went unfed.

The reception leaves almost no soft spot. A 97% Overwhelmingly Positive rating on Steam across more than forty thousand reviews makes it one of the most beloved entries the genre has on the platform; on the critical side, OpenCritic stamps it Strong with a recommendation rate near seventy-four percent, Metacritic sits at 79, and China's Gamersky handed it an 8.5. Critics and players landed, rarely, on the same verdict — and it is genuinely uncommon to see an indie clear both the professional bar and the community bar at once. This one did.

Who should buy it, who can wait, and which version to grab

So who is it for? The answer is unusually clean. If you ache for the Super Mario 64 and Banjo-Kazooie joy of running through three-dimensional levels and prying collectibles out of every corner, and you have been parched for it on PC, this is a hill you basically cannot route around. If you want something cute, easygoing, and split-screen-ready for an evening with a kid or a partner, it fits just as well. And if you are the tinkering sort who wants Death Wish to brutalise you or lives in the Workshop's custom maps, the long tail will keep you fed for a long time.

Flip it around, and if you only play story-driven blockbusters and have no patience for a find-everything collection loop, this may not be your dish — its pleasure is fundamentally about exploring handcrafted three-dimensional levels, and you have to actually enjoy that. There is no cover-shooter fallback here, no sprawling RPG menu to get lost in; if the core act of jumping around a space and prying its secrets loose does not light you up, no amount of charm will paper over that mismatch. Be honest with yourself about it before you buy. As for versions, the call is simple: take the PC build, because only it runs Workshop mods, and that is the key to stretching the game past a hundred hours; if you want the hardcore gauntlet, add Seal the Deal on top. On balance, it is a no-hesitation buy for anyone who loves this genre, and well worth a spot on everyone else's to-play list — discount or no discount.