Backtracking is a blogging project that I began in 2024 in which I will play one game from each year since I was born, up until the present. My goal is to engage with games I’ve never played and divert some of my attention away from new releases and towards older titles. I hope to cross off some major backlog items, learn more about the influences and intertexts that informed the games I grew up with, and practice my analytical skills. I’m using US release dates as the relevant year for my selections.
Why I Chose This Game
3D platformers must have been my earliest video game fascination. As a child I played whatever I could get my hands on, but in my early elementary school years, I always gravitated toward bright, colorful platformers.
Like Mario, right? Banjo Kazooie? Well, not quite. I can’t explain why, but I always was a PlayStation kid growing up. My favorites were Spyro the Dragon and Crash Bandicoot and their lesser-known peers (anybody remember Croc?), not to mention a parade of underwhelming Disney-branded platformers in various styles. When I had an occasional brush with Mario 64, I found it too slippery and complex. When I puttered around in Ocarina of Time’s opening moments, I found myself baffled and frustrated by the lack of a dedicated jump button. Platformers were my fundamental lens for understanding 3D games.
By 2003, I had moved onto the PS2. The path I had chosen pointed firmly towards Jak II, the hilariously edgy sequel to beloved classic Jak and Daxter. Looking back, I can see that embracing the moody, desaturated teenager-targeted era of Naughty Dog (Jak II and Jak 3) and Insomniac (Ratchet & Clank) informed the trajectory of my interests, a shift that was amplified by my dad introducing first person shooters to me on the PC.
If I’d been a GameCube kid, I likely would have wound up playing Billy Hatcher instead. Would it have been the last of the bright and colorful platformers that dominated my attention? Or would I have spent a lot longer in the saturated Nintendo sunshine? It’s in this sense that I see Billy Hatcher as a purely circumstantial inflection point in the evolution of my own taste. So for 2003, I sampled from an alternate timeline of my childhood.
What I Thought
Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg is an adventure through a series of big playground-like worlds in which Billy must rescue Morning Land from the villainous crows. It’s a goofy hodgepodge of chicken and egg imagery, drawing from all the video game tropes you’d expect: hatching monsters out of eggs, bowling enemies over with eggs, equippable rooster combs that have different powers, and the like.
Being developed by Sonic Team, it’s no surprise that the core feature of the game is its movement. Rolling around eggs, bashing them into enemies, slamming them on the ground, and launching forward to clear gaps; all of it is fiddly and strange at first, and it takes some time to get used to it. With enough attention, though, it does have interesting texture, and reasonable capacity for advanced techniques and mastery. In many ways, movement in Billy Hatcher is about starting, stopping, and controlling your momentum.
The level design isn’t groundbreaking or particularly elegant, but it does accomplish its overall goal: big sandboxes with a bunch of interlocking paths and barriers that can be shifted around to craft different routes and challenges. Each stage takes place in one of the worlds and has some particular objective; rescue a supporting character, defeat a number of enemies, reach a particular spot, etc. The later stages lean much more heavily on instant-death pitfalls that can become very tiresome, and create a level of deeply unearned difficulty. In some ways, the problem of escalating difficulty is always touchy in platformers like this, where the technical mastery of movement is confounded by factors like imprecise physics and clumsy camera movement. I found the difficulty of the later stages to be irritating; the limited lives made long levels more tedious than necessary.
Difficulty aside, though, most of the game is what I might call playful; throughout the stages can be found dozens of different eggs with patterns to distinguish them, each hatching into different kinds of powerups and pets. Hatching an egg involves rolling it over collectibles found around the level and dropped by defeated enemies. The pets can be used to attack and are often more effective against bigger enemies than bashing them with eggs, but they vanish after they’ve been activated 5 or 6 times. Other powerups change the comb on Billy’s rooster costume to imbue the eggs he rolls with elemental affinities or extra damage. Finally, there’s a slot for one-time-use powerups that do things like make Billy invisible or invincible or heal him a bit. Since few things last, and there’s always something a little better, you’ll always be rotating between different powerups to get the most out of them.
None of these different abilities is substantially unique or dramatically better than others, but they are all there for you to seek out, experiment with, and choose favorites from. The elemental aspects are barely used, the various wearable powerups are neat but never utilized, and, infuriatingly, boss fights use none of these elements. The boss fights are mostly forgettable and utterly uninterested in the broader mechanical space of the rest of the game, using only the default eggs (no pets, powerups, elemental damage, advanced movement techniques, etc.).
Ultimately, this disappointing simplicity gives a clearer picture of what Billy Hatcher is. Layered on top of its relatively interesting movement is a relatively uninteresting toybox of monsters and powerups, each unique enough to be distinct but not deeply embedded into the design of the enemies and challenges in the surrounding game. And… that’s fine? It’s nice that there’s a double jump ability — even if it’s never actually useful. Because when you find it, it’s cool! But it still leaves me wishing for more.
To reinforce the toybox appeal, everything comes in a brightly colored package; each world begins in night, and changes into daylight after rescuing the sage. This means that most of your time spent there will be in the sunny, saturated version of the world. The soundtrack is similarly playful, upbeat and frenetic and full of blasts of brass and busy melodies over jaunty beats.
Overall, I found myself… whelmed. It was fun to see what the game was all about. I like some aspects of its core movement, but its difficulty in the later stages was profoundly annoying. It’s bright, pleasant, and fun to move around in, but the delight wears off quickly as the shallowness of the surrounding systems become evident.
Reflections
Recently, I’ve picked up a few 3D platformers from the modern indie resurgence, complete with their throwback graphics and undergirded by strange, distinctive, and expressive movement systems. A lot has changed in the past two decades, and the people who are making this style of game now were in love with the deepest nuances of the platformers they played in their youths. They build movement toolkits that emphasize depth above all else.
I don’t come to 3D platformers for sheer challenge like I do with Dark Souls and the like. There’s something delightful about engaging with art that’s almost nostalgic, that feels adjacent to things you’re actually nostalgic for, but is still wholly new to you. My takeaway, though, is that I may have more fun replaying games like this that I still love than I will playing ones that passed me by.