A little throwback platformer years in the making
Hatch Tales: A Heroic Hookshot Adventure is a long title for a game that’s deceptively small. Though I’m a big character action platformer guy, I didn’t necessarily know anything before getting sent a review code, so when I first looked at this game it seemed to be simple. But it’s not!
Atooi’s Hatch Tales is actually quite involved, with a lot of stages and puzzles and a huge collect-a-thon built in. It’s a side-scrolling action platformer in the vein of games like Mario, with worlds broken up into 1-1, 2-1. There are power-ups that affect the way that we move through the stage and achieve different goals. There is a lot of game here. I’d played for several hours before realizing I was only maybe three-fourths of the way through at best. While there are a lot of stages to get through, there are also a lot of fun and different puzzles.
The base mechanics are a jump and a hookshot, the latter of which moves about four or five squares. The game basically has routes that are planned out through the stages, and it’s up to us to figure out how to maneuver through those. The levels are pretty challenging to get through. There’s a good mixture of both challenge and difficulty while also having a sort of easier path to get through if we’re not looking to grab all the collectibles throughout the stage.
And there are a lot. There are a hundred diamond coins that we’re trying to acquire in each stage, while also an assortment of specific tokens, too. Early on we want to collect everything, so we’re going through that more difficult path, but as things get more and more tough we hop back and forth depending on if we want to clear a stage quicker or have a few tries to get everything. It’s a great portable game, because even if we’ve completed a level we can go back at any time and try to grab more items.
The art style is an interesting topic, but it’s important to cover. The visuals are big and the art simplisticm but it works in service to the gameplay. It also happens to be a sort of leftover from the game’s long development, which started as an updated version of Chicken Wiggle for the 3DS before moving onto the Switch. The visual style was kept, with big characters that maybe fit a 3DS sized aspect ratio, albeit was overhauled into HD for the bigger screen. The art doesn’t lie to us that our character is actually like three spaces off or something like that, but at the same time, for six years, it seems like there wasn’t a lot of updates to the original direction. It works well for the gameplay, but it comes off as overly simplified today.
But as the experience of playing it, even if my only complaint is the art style, is that it’s otherwise a very fun game. It’s certainly not going to be up there with the likes of Super Mario Wonder or even a 3D game like Sonic x Shadow Generations, but what’s here is a very good package. I think it’s a good secondary game or if we’re waiting for our next action platformer, if we’re more of an indie action platformer fan and we’ve played that big catch game this year.
This review is based on a Nintendo Switch eShop code sent to SideQuesting by the publisher. It originally appeared on the November 3rd, 2024 episode of The SideQuest. Images and video courtesy the publisher.
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