If you have even a passing familiar with Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, you probably remember its Fulton recovery system. To equip the game’s base-building element with characters and equipment, you retrieve those items from the open world by attaching them to balloons, which float off-screen for convenient transportation. back to the headquarters of your rogue paramilitary operation. By any measure, and especially on the scale of an obsessively detailed military stealth-action game, it’s a colossally stupid development.
So silly, in fact, that it fits the cartoon styles of The Hatbox of Mr. Sun, which seems to always be there. Due to this roguelike platformer developed by Kenny Sun, you also lead a rogue paramilitary operation that does not see the borders of the government or their laws (you are, after all, a delivery person for a company called ” Amazing”). The difference is that you operate out of a client’s basement to retrieve a stolen package, embarking on missions similar to the dangerous 2D platforming levels of Spelunky. Completing these missions helps fund your operation, giving you both an arsenal and an army to use through mission rewards, black-market purchases, and balloons attached to either useful looking objects and characters you may encounter along the way. .
Quite unlike Metal Gear, you don’t play as a character. Instead, you individually control whichever randomly generated blob-person(s) you choose for a mission, where they can die permanently. The characters are distinguished (in addition to various ironic nicknames) mainly by their individual characteristics, a set of characteristics and quirks that completely change how you approach the game depending on the per- mission, per-agent basis. These variables are further complicated by the wide range of equipment available, which includes ping pong rackets, shark hats, and plates of bouncy flan in addition to the usual selection of guns, explosives, and sharp objects.
Photo: Kenny Sun/Raw Fury
Especially in the early hours of the game, many of the character traits are undesirable, and you’re essentially forced to make do with what little you have. An agent can have an extremely useful “taser” trait stunning any guard they can touch. But they can also have “dry eyes,” which darken the screen every few seconds because they have to blink so hard.
Much of the game involves strategizing around these quirks whenever possible. When snapping a guard’s neck, for example, the “guilty of conscience” trait sends your character into an uncontrollable panic for a few brief but potentially crucial seconds during which they could blunder into a trap or in the sightline of another guard. To avoid this, you can be careful to kill exclusively (and probably more impersonally) with weapons, or you can drag each body to some remote location where it’s safe for your designated agent to remove any anxiety after killing.
But it’s easy to forget these techniques in the heat of the moment or in the pile of available units and equipment, and the chaotic chain reaction that results is The Hatbox of Mr. Sun very special. For example, I accidentally bonded my agent with their own boomerang, which activated the “weak-gut” trait of instant defecation upon being hit, which I discovered brought a guard to investigate the source of the new- new smell In another mission, I learned the hard way that the “forgetful” trait removes the indicator for the only character you have to keep alive.
Photo: Kenny Sun/Raw Fury
The result is all the fun of a certain out-of-control Spelunky session with the added wrinkle of continued development; Stealth base building forces you to not only guard your equipment stores but also consider your personnel and which of them you can afford to lose. Continuing to choose a particular agent for missions will level them up, giving them more health as they grow out of unhelpful traits and become more useful. But that agent becomes more important over time, to the point where their combination of useful properties becomes difficult to justify the risk on anything but the most difficult and important missions, if any. man. Furthermore, mechanics like the skill tree are based on the levels of characters you’ve benched to perform those tasks — a seasoned level-7 operative will contribute more to the tree’s research skill than a level-2 newcomer. The game encourages you to stick your best units together with desk jobs while the more unpredictable agents in the field threaten.
in process, The Hatbox of Mr. Sun brilliantly answers the age-old question of how to get players to take risks and engage with new mechanics instead of just sticking to familiar ones. By incentivizing you to flirt with chaos, it creates a gameplay loop where so many of the most intense and inventive moments come from hilarious failure. It is the rare game that is as scary to lose as it is to win.
The Hatbox of Mr. Sun was released on April 20 on Nintendo Switch and Windows PC. The game was tested on PC using a download code provided by Raw Fury. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. This does not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. you will find more information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.
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