Pursuit of Hat

If only America's founding fathers had realised that this game's protagonist was to start each of its 20 levels separated from his hat, surely they would have framed the Declaration of Independence with slightly different wording. The game's goal is, naturally, to reunite the wearer with its chapeau at whatever cost necessary to overcome and circumvent the obstacles strewn in the way. Borrowing some ideas (specifically, of helpful self-dismemberment) from 1993's Plok, this game allows the player's avatar to remove and toss away body parts -- two arms, two legs and the torso, eventually leaving a head to roll around, especially through small tunnels. Now, this lizard-like shedding of precious body parts isn't just cutting off your nose to spite your face -- typically the limbs will be used to activate an out-of-reach switch (or to sustain its pressing while attending to other business elsewhere) or to weigh down a scale which the remainder of the avatar's corpus will later counterbalance. As long as there are arms to climb with, the avatar can haul itself up platforms, but to achieve greater distance travelled, however fragmentary, body parts will often get stuffed into a cannon and then shot across the screen. Any parts the avatar reunites with can be re-integrated into the whole, provided there is a body for them to knit themselves on to -- but many levels are completed just by a head, albeit one sporting a fashionable hat.