Mr. Sun's Hatbox

Kenny Sun makes strange games. His résumé—Circa Infinity, a hypnotic ring-based platformer, and Yankai’s Peak, a minimalist puzzle box—reads like the work of a designer allergic to convention. Mr. Sun’s Hatbox, published by Raw Fury and released April 20, 2023 for $14.99, is his most ambitious swing yet, and also his messiest, in the best and occasionally worst senses of that word.

The premise is deliberately idiotic: a courier delivering a precious hatbox gets it stolen by the villainous Mr. Moon, and you take command of a delivery company to steal it back through an escalating series of heists. That setup is a wrapper for something far weirder—a genre collision that fuses 2D physics-driven stealth-action, roguelite permadeath, and base-building management into a single, wobbling contraption. Think Hotline Miami‘s twitchy lethality run through a ragdoll physics engine, bolted to an XCOM-lite roster of disposable operatives, all played for laughs.

It launched into a crowded roguelite market where “procedural variety” has become table stakes and most entrants blur together. Sun’s differentiator is tone and systemic depth. This is a game about emergence—about the unrepeatable disaster that unfolds when a mistimed grapple, a bouncing grenade, and a knocked-out guard collide in a single physics frame.

It is not a game for everyone. The same systemic looseness that generates its funniest moments also generates its most frustrating ones. But as a piece of design, it is doing things few others attempt at this budget level.

• Physics-Driven Stealth-Combat: Every mission plays out in a ragdoll physics sandbox where knockouts, throws, and improvised weapons carry real momentum. Nothing is scripted; everything is a collision waiting to happen.
• Base-Building With a Dark Streak: Between runs you expand a base of operations—a Brig to brainwash captured enemies into recruits, a Lab to experiment on your own staff, and a Black Market for contraband. The progression systems have teeth and a genuinely twisted sense of humor.
• Permadeath + Randomized Quirks: Each operative rolls random traits that make them better or catastrophically worse at specific jobs. When they die, they stay dead. The roster churns, and every run tells a different story.
• The Hat Arsenal: A large library of hats and improvised weapons grant unpredictable abilities—the game’s primary engine of both power and slapstick.
• Local Co-op: Couch multiplayer that turns the chaos communal.

The Gameplay Loop

The core loop is simple on the surface and quietly clever underneath. You pick an operative, load into a mission—infiltrate a compound, extract a target, cause specific mayhem—and try to execute it before the physics engine executes you. Fail, and that operative may die permanently. Succeed, and you bank resources to expand the base, which unlocks new tools, which reshape how the next mission plays.

What separates Hatbox from the roguelite pack is that the systems talk to each other constantly. Capture an enemy instead of killing them, drag them back to the Brig, and brainwash them into a recruit with their own quirk set. Send that recruit to the Lab and mutate their stats. The base isn’t a stat-menu with a coat of paint—it’s a pipeline that converts the consequences of one mission into the tools for the next. That feedback loop is where the game’s replayability is earned honestly rather than as marketing filler.

Emergence Over Authorship

Sun has clearly decided that the player’s best stories should be ones he never wrote. A stealth run collapses because a guard’s body, flung across a room, triggers an alarm you didn’t see. A grenade meant for an enemy bounces off a wall and back into your own recruit’s face. These aren’t bugs; they’re the point. The design privileges systemic emergence over authored set-pieces, and when it clicks, it produces the kind of laugh-out-loud disaster that no scripted game can match.

The cost of that philosophy is control precision. The physics that generate the comedy also generate the jank. The controls are built loose, and that looseness shows at exactly the wrong moments. When you die to your own ragdoll rather than a fair mistake, the emergence stops being funny and starts being cheap. This is the central tension of the game: the same loose simulation that makes it special makes it occasionally infuriating.

Onboarding Friction

Here is the game’s clearest failure. The early difficulty and tutorial curve is steep and muddled. Hatbox throws systems at you—stealth, physics combat, base management, quirks, permadeath—without adequately teaching how they interlock. The first hour is built to bounce newcomers off, with repeated deaths to mechanics they don’t yet understand and no way to tell skill issues from interface confusion. It’s a real problem. A game this systemically rich needed a far more patient onboarding ramp, and Sun didn’t build one. Those who push through will find the depth worth it. Many won’t push through.

Repetition at the Margins

The mission structure reveals its seams the longer a campaign runs. The objective types repeat, and once the physics are internalized, the moment-to-moment variety leans heavily on the hat-and-gadget roulette to stay fresh. It mostly succeeds, but the underlying mission scaffolding is thinner than the systems layered on top of it. This is a game better savored in bursts than binged.

The pixel art is Sun’s signature—clean, expressive, and readable even when the screen dissolves into a pile of flailing limbs. That readability matters enormously in a physics game; you always know what just hit you, even if you couldn’t have predicted it. The animation sells the slapstick, with ragdolls that flop and tumble with real comic weight. As a 2D game of this scope, it’s light on hardware by design.

The UI, however, inherits the game’s onboarding problem—menus and base-management screens that assume more context than a new player has. Function trails behind form in the interface, and a first-time user will spend more time than they should figuring out where things live.

On Steam, a controller is strongly preferable to mouse-and-keyboard. The twin-stick-adjacent movement and aiming want analog input; keyboard play works but feels like fighting the game with one hand tied. Steam is also where the modding-and-tinkering crowd will feel most at home, and where the co-op is easiest to wrangle.

On Nintendo Switch, the game finds a natural home. Its burst-friendly run structure and pick-up-and-play missions suit handheld play well, and the couch local co-op is a natural fit for the Switch’s detachable Joy-Con. The tradeoff: the smaller handheld screen can make the busiest physics chaos harder to parse, and the Joy-Con’s smaller sticks are less suited to the game’s precision demands. Docked with a Pro Controller is the setup the Switch version is built for.

Mr. Sun’s Hatbox is a roguelite with a real point of view. It refuses to smooth its own edges, and that refusal is both its defining strength and its most obvious flaw. The physics sandbox generates comedy and catastrophe in equal measure, the base-building systems have genuine depth and a wicked streak, and the whole thing is held together by Sun’s confident, absurdist design sensibility.

But it makes you work for it. The first hour is a wall, the controls occasionally betray you, and the mission variety thins out under scrutiny. This is a game that trusts you to meet it halfway—to forgive its jank in exchange for its invention. Do that, and it rewards you with some funny, surprising moments few other games in the genre can produce. It’s not a masterpiece. It’s something more interesting: a flawed, fearless experiment that’s more memorable than a dozen safer, more polished competitors—and one we recommend only to the right audience.