Mr. Sun’s Hatbox lets you manage a rogue paramilitary operation, AKA a delivery system for a company called « Amazin » that must retrieve stolen packages. It combines the goofy air balloon recruitment mechanic from Metal Gear Solid 5 and the daring 2D platforming of Spelunky.
If you have even a passing familiarity with Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain, you probably remember its Fulton recovery system. To supply the game’s base-building element with personnel and equipment, you pluck those things out of the open world by attaching them to balloons, which sail offscreen for convenient transport back to the headquarters of your rogue paramilitary operation. By any measure, and particularly by the measure of an obsessively detailed military stealth-action game, it is an immensely silly flourish.
It’s so silly, in fact, that it fits right into the cartoon stylings of Mr. Sun’s Hatbox, as though it always belonged there. Because in this roguelike platformer developed by Kenny Sun, you also head up a rogue paramilitary operation unbeholden to the borders of government or their laws (you are, after all, a delivery person for a company called “Amazin”). The difference is that you operate out of a client’s basement in order to retrieve a stolen package, embarking on missions that resemble the perilous 2D platforming levels of Spelunky. Completing these missions helps fund your operation, supplying you with both an arsenal and an army to make use of it through mission rewards, black-market purchases, and balloons attached to any of the useful-seeming items and characters you may encounter along the way.
Quite unlike Metal Gear, you don’t play as a single character. Instead, you individually control whichever randomly-generated blob-person(s) you’ve selected for a mission, where they may very well die permanently. The characters are distinguished (in addition to various ironic nicknames) mainly by their individual attributes, an array of traits and quirks that completely change how you approach the game depending on a per-mission, per-agent basis.
