The Hat Man: Shadow Ward is an inexpensive game developed by Game Mechanics LLC that I picked up a while back (last year?) when it was on sale (so, it was about $1, which included the soundtrack apparently), and for that price, I am kind of okay with that. Had I paid $15, I would be upset, a little annoyed, but ultimately I would probably stick with my purchase as I do not feel the need to demand a refund every time I purchase something that I am not happy with through no fault of the developer. What research I did before purchasing The Hat Man: Shadow Ward consisted of watching the trailer, looking through the available pictures, seeing the price be somewhere around very cheap, and bought it, so ultimately, no arguments. Now that that is out of the way, let's talk about The Hat Man: Shadow Ward.
The description of the game on Steam says that you "discover the horror of the Canton insane asylum as you attempt to rescue your daughter." Okay, pretty vague, yet you know the basic plot. The trailer too gives a pretty decent depiction of what to expect.
To date, I have spent 38 minutes with this game so I can only comment on what little of the game that I have played, which is pretty much the whole point of these First Impressions articles. But after the 38 minutes, my reaction was kind of, "Meh."
Initially I was a little confused as to what I was supposed to be doing, after finding out in-game that my daughter was not in her room in the asylum/hospital that she was staying in. Without giving too much away, everything went from this:
to this:
in nearly the blink of an eye.
So you the player, who has the option of playing as either the Mother or Father (and both are fully voice acted (not great, but not Resident Evil on the PSX bad) end up looking for your daughter who has inexplicably gone missing. The rest of my time was spent playing a clone-esque skin of Slender: The Eight Pages, all the way down to actually collecting pages through what seemed like a procedurally generated lower floor of a not very well maintained psychiatric hospital. Once I realized that, at least this part of The Hat Man: Shadow Ward, was the game that I was playing, my interest plummeted dramatically. Similar to how my interest in the full game Slender: The Arrival dropped off when I reached the stage in the game that was paying homage/a remake of Slender: The Eight Pages. This was not the game that I thought I was signing up for and I am not sure how I feel about that.
I will say that very often the game looks very good, which the occasional exception, such as door handles being two dimensionally "printed" onto doors, but that is purely cosmetic. One other annoyance I noticed, was that early on, there was a door that was partly opened that I was unable to interact with. Sure, the closed door that I could not open or interact with, the fact that it was closed with no door handle meant that I could not open it, but a door five inches open should be able to be opened. Unless of course that there is a corpse blocking the door. One other instance that bothered me was that a particular item was established, early on and in an obvious manner to have a secondary effect, that I have not found to be universal. Yeah, that is a bit of a vague statement, but give yourself 10 minutes in the game and you will realize what I meant.
One last interesting thing, is that when you start the game, you are prompted to set the screen size and graphics quality, which for me I have it at "Good" rather than "Fantastic" or "So So" since "Fantastic" runs very slow for me. Even on "Good" which is playable, runs at about 20 fps max, and even on "So So," I max out at 20 fps.
Well, that is my limited experience with The Hat Man: Shadow Ward, a seemingly Slender: The Eight Pages clone set in a procedurally generated asylum. And while the game is pretty scary, it is scary for similar reasons that Slender is scary: that you know you are being hunted in a contained area while forced to collect pages before you either die or beat the game. There is even an achievement for beating the game in under 30 minutes, so it is at least obvious to the developers that there is, at the absolute bare minimum, 29 minutes 59 seconds worth of content here, and honestly, if you loved Slender: The Eight Pages and want to play a similar game with a different setting, then The Hat Man: Shadow Ward is right up your darkened alley.
~JWfW/JDub/Jaconian
P.S. But do not forget:
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