Hatup is a frustrating low-budget indie puzzle-platformer game that is aimed towards achievement hunters for a quick completion.
You control a black character that needs to collect a fez hat and find the double door exit of the level. There are 30 levels and each level gets increasingly more difficult. At first you just need to jump and avoid spikes, but in later levels you need to find colored keys to unlock areas in the level, toggles blocks by picking up the hat, the level size increases to 2 screens and enemies with spears appear in the last few levels. Your character can double jump (
) and use a dash-move (
) in the air, but that dash-move is disabled once you have the hat equipped, though the tutorial doesn't do a very good job in explaining all of it.
While the first 20 or so levels are fairly easy to traverse the last 10 levels are a test of nerves and frustration resulting in some of the most unnecessarily challenging and annoying levels you could imagine. They requiring extremely precise platforming skills often with jumps and falls that require split-second inputs to land on a platform before hitting a spike. When you select a level you can choose between "Normal" and "Hard" difficulty, on Normal you have 4 lives per level on Hard just 1. This means on Normal when you die you keep all found items (hat & keys) until you lose all 4 lives which resets the level, on Hard each time you die you reset the level. The stages which go over 2 screens even include a checkpoint marker. For some reason the game has no quick-reset button, so that means if you mess up a start of a level then you either back out to the main menu and reselect the current level or you kill your character until the level is reset.
Unfortunately the controls feel very off which resulted in a lot of frustration. When using the left-stick
or the d-pad
the character accelerates in a strange way which often makes it difficult to drop to a lower platform or stop moving before hitting a spike. The double jump feels very unresponsive, sometimes if you press A twice too quickly the 2nd jump will not happen, other times if you wait a slightly bit too long your character won't do the 2nd jump or hits a spike or an enemy. The dash-move (
) is directional, so you can also dash upwards or diagonally, but if you play with the left-stick
then you can accidentally dash diagonally into a spike or sometime the dash moves too far and you hit an enemy.
UPDATE: According to the
comments in the forum section, the controls work fine when your controller is connected via a wire to the console which might solve the frustrating issues I experienced with my wireless controller.
From a presentation perspective the game is fairly low-budget: It has a 2D retro-inspired pixel art, each element (character, keys, spikes, enemies hat, exit) is easy to identify and there is some annoying music running in a loop the background.
In conclusion I would not recommend this game to anyone except for those who care about boosting their gamerscore for cheap. The game feels like some weekend project of a person learning to use the Unity engine, without having play-tested the whole thing, otherwise I cannot explain why someone would create such a frustrating game. I didn't find it fun to play towards the end and after 3 hours I was glad to have unlocked all the achievements and quickly uninstalled it. Though it seems that some people actually did enjoy it
according to the forum.
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