Chapeau is a multiplayer platformer about being a hat

If Team Fortress 2 taught me anything, it's that hats are great. Austrian indie devs Salt Castle Studio reckon they're great enough to warrant their own game altogether, so they've created Chapeau, a multiplayer platformer in which you control various pieces of headwear, from helmets to top hats. An alpha version is launching "soon".

You can watch the first gameplay trailer above. You compete against friends in various modes, including The Floor is Lava—where the floor is literally lava—to Where is Wilhelm, where you have to find a pictured NPC and be the first to nestle on their head.

The game's website talks about the importance of momentum, and you'll be bouncing off buildings and NPCs' heads to keep your speed up. You'll skid across certain surfaces and jump between platforms, and different hats will require a different play style. Naturally, there are various styles and colours of hats to choose from, and you unlock them by playing. 

It doesn't yet have a page on any store that I can see, but it might be worth keeping an eye on if you're into silly, local multiplayer games.  

Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.