The Prime Hat Membership ($0.99) is a nostalgic little recreation in some methods. It’s a platformer with (largely) single-screen phases which have mild puzzle parts. It’s tailored from a browser recreation. It offers you the entire recreation for an inexpensive, easy up-front worth. It carries no grand message, and makes use of a clear however distinct visible fashion. Oh, and it’s important to use contact controls. It looks 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 respect extra.
So sure, The Prime Hat Membership. A elaborate 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 you could’t even set foot within the door with out assembly the costume code, and which means you’ve obtained to have a prime hat. It’s proper within the identify and every little thing. Fortuitously, prime hats appear to only be laying round. All it’s important to do is don the hat and head for the door. As long as you will have the hat, they need to allow you to go inside… proper?
Effectively, anyway. The purpose in a lot of the recreation’s thirty-plus phases is to choose up the hat from wherever within the stage it’s situated after which make your technique to the door. It sounds straightforward, and typically it’s. The trick is that if you happen to hit your head or in any other case disturb the hat, it would fall off. And wouldn’t it, the phases usually have obstacles that may knock that hat clear off your head if you happen to don’t method issues fastidiously. So it’s essential to be sure to’ve deliberate a route that may take you to the exit with out dropping the hat. You actually do need to plan too, as lots of the phases embody disappearing platforms or different non permanent parts that make it so as to solely have one crack at it.
You’ve gotten limitless lives, after all. It could be gauche today if you happen to didn’t. Annoyingly, everytime you die, lose your hat, or fail the stage for some other cause, a Sport 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 means I don’t actually take care of. I haven’t talked about it but, however every stage additionally has 5 cash to attempt to gather. Attending to the exit in a lot of the phases is a comparatively easy affair, however getting the cash requires a superb eye for the route you must take and exact execution. You’ll most likely fail loads, and having to hammer that restart as an alternative of immediately respawning will get agitating.
My different bones to choose with this recreation come from the controls. Initially, it’s important to 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 if you happen to’re going to have a cell platformer that makes use of contact controls with digital buttons as the one technique of enter, it’s important to make lifeless sure these controls are spot-on. Regrettably, I discovered these ones to be a bit missing. The sport would typically miss inputs on the digital buttons, and that proved to be deadly in some phases. The mixture of this situation and the shortage of an computerized restart had me crawling the partitions at occasions.
I suppose it speaks to the standard of the sport itself that I used to be prepared to persevere by way of these points irrespective of how livid I obtained. The extent designs listed here are fairly good, with a pleasant stability 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 drive you to use the abilities you’ve discovered in new methods. It’s not a really lengthy recreation on the entire, nevertheless it doesn’t overstay its welcome by even a minute. Getting all of the cash is an effective recreation extender, and there are just a few little secrets and techniques to spherical issues out properly. You get a superb buck’s price out of it, to make sure.
The Prime Hat Membership feels prefer it fell out of a distinct period of the App Retailer, for higher or worse. Principally 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 attraction, and whereas it received’t final a very long time it would take up your consideration effectively till the tip. Some contact management points and minor UI scrapes saved it from knocking my socks off fully, however given the extremely cheap worth and every little thing else it has going for it, I believe I can suggest this to cell platformer followers.
