Hare In The Hat is a free mobile app that's been dumped on Steam as a paid product, as if it was a real PC game (it's not)... it's a cash grab from greedy mobile devs. This mobile app is a series of small tile matching/jigsaw/slider puzzles aimed at kids I guess, or the kind of people who prefer gaming on iPhones instead of PC. Which is fine if mobile devs stay in their own lane, but nope, here we are again with yet another mobile app for me to warn gamers about.
From a technical perspective, as a mobile app, this doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
There's no option to change the resolution and no useful graphics tweaks. There's no way to ensure this is running at the native resolution of your display. There's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision.
The mobile app features simple, cartoony 2D graphics, of the type you normally expect to see in low effort mobile apps. 3D graphics programming does require a degree of skill and competence and unfortunately not all developers have the budget or talent to deliver this, despite 3D graphics cards hitting the mainstream in the 1990's. Considering this is being evaluated as a PC game, having the graphics phoned in like this isn't going to result in a high quality, visually impressive game that PC gamers are used to seeing.
Because this is a mobile app, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the iPhones that the mobile app was designed for. These are unfortunate handicaps and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was an afterthought for the iPhone developers who are to blame for this. The mobile app is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for mobile phones forces upon a game. Once more, mobile devs have made gaming worse for everyone. I didn't spend thousands on building a gaming rig just so I could pretend it's an iPhone.
These technical defects push this mobile app below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
Hare In The Hat didn't appeal much to the people who own a copy of the mobile app, either. It has achievements, and they show us a very clear picture that the mobile app didn't really capture any interest from gamers. The most commonly and easily attained achievement is for solving the easiest puzzle, trivial to get, but less than 23 percent of players bothered to get that far before uninstalling the mobile app. Hardly a success story, gamers just weren't all that interested in the mobile app.
Reviewing SteamDB to check how popular this mobile app was with players reveals a surprise... there's a very healthy spike in player counts for the mobile app. But this only happened once, around the same time that trading cards were applied to the mobile app... so this is just card idlers getting their cards and moving on. A closer look at the numbers shows the mobile app just has a couple of players every week running up the mobile app and idling it for cards, then deleting it. We must ask how it benefits gamers for there to be so many mobile apps like this, with no merit as a serious game, that only generate sales from people idling and selling the trading cards.
So, should you buy this mobile app?
Once more we see greedy mobile devs trying to scam PC gamers. On Steam, this is $2 USD, on app stores, it's free. Mobile devs must learn PC gamers are not here to be gouged, and can't be expected to pay TWO BUCKS FOR A FREE MOBILE APP just because it's been lazily dumped on Steam. This is unacceptable disrespect for PC gamers. Because this can be played free elsewhere, and because of the other defects, it's impossible to recommend.
Just who do they think we are?
