Review: Mr. Sun’s Hatbox mashes up Metal Gear Solid 5 and Spelunky

You should be familiar with Metal Gear SolidPhantom PainYou probably recall 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. This is a silly addition to a game that’s known for its meticulously detailed stealth-action.

It’s so silly, in fact, that it fits right into the cartoon stylings of Mr. Sun’s HatboxAs if it were always 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. The completion of these missions will help you fund your operations. They provide you both with an arsenal and army that you can make use of through the mission rewards, the black-market purchase, and the balloons you attach to the items or characters which seem to be useful.

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. Characters are differentiated (apart from various ironic names) by their unique attributes. These traits and quirks can completely alter how you play the game, depending on which mission, or agent, they’re assigned to. The wide variety of equipment available, including ping-pong rackets and shark hats as well as plates of bouncy flannel, further complicates the variables.

Kenny Sun/Raw Fury

Especially in the game’s early hours, many of the character traits are undesirable, and you’re essentially forced to work around what little you have. One agent might have the intensely useful “taser” trait of stunning any guard they touch. But they might also have “dry eyes,” which blacks out the screen every few seconds because they have to blink a lot.

In order to win the game, you will need to strategize around certain quirks. Upon snapping a guard’s neck, for example, the “guilty conscience” trait sends your character hopping around in an uncontrollable panic for a few brief yet potentially pivotal seconds during which they might blunder into a trap or the sightline of another guard. To circumvent this, you can take care to kill exclusively (and presumably more impersonally) with weapons, or you can drag each body to some secluded area where it’s safe for your assigned agent to shake off any post-murder jitters.

But it’s easy to lose track of these strategies in the heat of the moment or in the pile of available units and equipment, and the chaotic chain reactions that result are what make Mr. Sun’s HatboxSo special. I have, for example, accidentally bonked my agent with their own boomerang, which activated the “weak bowels” trait of immediately shitting upon being hit, which I then discovered brings a guard to investigate the origin of the brand-new stench. On another mission, I learned the hard way that the “forgetful” trait removes the indicator for the single character you’re supposed to keep alive.

Kenny Sun/Raw Fury

It’s all the excitement of an out-of control situation. Spelunky The base building adds a new twist to the session: persistent progress. You are forced to keep a close eye not just on your inventory, but also your staff and which of them you cannot afford to lose. By selecting the same agent repeatedly for each mission, they will gain health and grow from unhelpful to more helpful traits. Over time, the agent’s combination of useful traits will become so valuable that it is difficult, if not impossible, to risk them on missions other than the hardest and most pivotal ones. 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 skill tree research than a level-2 newcomer. It encourages you to keep your most reliable agents in desk jobs, while putting the less predictable ones out on the field.

In the process Mr. Sun’s HatboxThe game brilliantly addresses the question that has been asked for centuries: how can you get players to take more risks, and to try new mechanics instead of sticking to old ones? Incentivizing players to create chaos in the game, this loop of gameplay is where many of your most inventive and intense moments come from. It’s the rare game that’s as riveting to lose as it is to win.

Mr. Sun’s HatboxThe game was released on April 20 for Windows PC and Nintendo Switch. Raw Fury supplied a PC code to review the game. Vox Media is affiliated with other companies. Vox Media can earn affiliate commissions, but this does not affect editorial content. Find out more about affiliate links. additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.