The Prime Hat Membership ($0.99) is a nostalgic little sport in some methods. It’s a platformer with (principally) single-screen levels which have gentle puzzle parts. It’s tailored from a browser sport. It offers you the entire sport for an inexpensive, easy up-front value. It carries no grand message, and makes use of a clear however distinct visible fashion. Oh, and you must use contact controls. It appears like one thing that we might have seen pop up ten years in the past and brought without any consideration, however maybe right here and now it’s one thing we are able to recognize extra.
So sure, The Prime Hat Membership. A flowery place. Too fancy for the likes of you and me. However our little protagonist has a dream, and that dream is to sidle as much as that fancy bar and sip some fancy wine with some fancy gents. The issue is which you could’t even set foot within the door with out assembly the costume code, and meaning you’ve obtained to have a high hat. It’s proper within the identify and every part. Happily, high hats appear to simply be laying round. All you must do is don the hat and head for the door. As long as you have got the hat, they need to allow you to go inside… proper?
Properly, anyway. The purpose in a lot of the sport’s thirty-plus levels is to choose up the hat from wherever within the stage it’s situated after which make your solution to the door. It sounds simple, and generally it’s. The trick is that in the event you hit your head or in any other case disturb the hat, it’ll fall off. And wouldn’t you understand it, the levels usually have obstacles that can knock that hat clear off your head in the event you don’t method issues fastidiously. So you’ll want to be sure to’ve deliberate a route that can take you to the exit with out dropping the hat. You actually do need to plan too, as most of the levels embrace disappearing platforms or different momentary parts that make it so to solely have one crack at it.
You might have limitless lives, in fact. It will be gauche lately in the event you didn’t. Annoyingly, everytime you die, lose your hat, or fail the stage for every other cause, a Recreation Over menu will pop up. You’ll need to manually hit that restart choice every time, which is a design selection that runs in opposition to the present grain in a method I don’t actually look after. I haven’t talked about it but, however every stage additionally has 5 cash to attempt to accumulate. Attending to the exit in a lot of the levels is a comparatively easy affair, however getting the cash requires eye for the route it’s best to take and exact execution. You’ll in all probability fail loads, and having to hammer that restart as an alternative of immediately respawning will get agitating.
My different bones to choose with this sport come from the controls. To start with, you must use the contact controls. No controller assist proper now and I see no indications of it being deliberate. That isn’t the tip of the world, however in the event you’re going to have a cell platformer that makes use of contact controls with digital buttons as the one technique of enter, you must make useless sure these controls are spot-on. Regrettably, I discovered these ones to be a bit missing. The sport would generally miss inputs on the digital buttons, and that proved to be deadly in some levels. The mixture of this problem and the shortage of an automated restart had me crawling the partitions at occasions.
I suppose it speaks to the standard of the sport itself that I used to be keen to persevere by these points regardless of how livid I obtained. The extent designs listed here are fairly good, with a pleasant steadiness of puzzles and platforming challenges to maintain you in your toes. It seeds in some new gimmicks alongside the way in which to freshen issues up, and there are some surprising twists in sure ranges that power you to use the abilities you’ve realized in new methods. It’s not a very lengthy sport on the entire, but it surely doesn’t overstay its welcome by even a minute. Getting all of the cash is an efficient sport extender, and there are a number of little secrets and techniques to spherical issues out properly. You get buck’s price out of it, to make certain.
The Prime Hat Membership feels prefer it fell out of a distinct period of the App Retailer, for higher or worse. Largely higher, however I certain do want that “worse” wasn’t there. It’s a enjoyable platformer with intelligent stage designs and a good bit of allure, and whereas it received’t final a very long time it’ll soak up your consideration effectively till the tip. Some contact management points and minor UI scrapes stored it from knocking my socks off utterly, however given the extremely cheap value and every part else it has going for it, I believe I can suggest this to cell platformer followers.
