Hyroglyphik Games’ King Of The Hat is an all new take on the fighting game genre. Instead of dwindling down your opponent’s life with fireballs and melee attacks, you simply have a hat that you must destroy.

In the world of King Of The Hat everyone has a hat; it’s their lifeblood. If the hat is destroyed so is their soul. You can destroy someone’s hat by simply crushing it.

In the gameplay this means that your goal is to find a way to get on top of your opponent and smash their hat. Alternatively, you can throw your hat at your opponent and force their hat to fall on the ground so that you can smash it. However, there’s a counter to that: if you throw your hat and your opponent manages to dodge it and your hat falls on the ground, they can jump on it and crush it to kill you.

As you can imagine, there’s an ebb and flow between players attempting to jump on their opponent’s hat while also attempting to protect their own hat. You can see what the gameplay is like with the pitch video below.

The game features a ridiculous cast of playable characters, including a princess, a fat cat, a ninja kid, and even a washing machine. Yes… a washing machine.

There’s actually a story to the game – and if they manage to hit the stretch goals on Kickstarter there are plans to include the story mode – where the fat cat named Fatcat wants to find ways to make more money selling hats and decides to kill Princess Kiara’s father. The fat cat also starts a gladiatorial game show pitting hat wearers against each other. Given that destroying a hat kills the wearer, it’s kind of a morbid story when you really think about it.

Anyway, the current goal is to unlock two new characters at the next stretch goal of the Kickstarter now that the project has surpassed the initial funding goal. Beyond that the team will add two new game modes. At the $20,000 mark they will add online play.

There’s still plenty of time left on the Kickstarter project… 21 days as of the writing of this article. So there’s definitely time to hit several stretch goals. Depending on how much they accrue there are also plans to make a console version. This game would be insanely fun on the Nintendo Switch with the motion controls to throw the hats.

If this seems like an interesting game to you, you can learn more by visiting the official Kickstarter page, or you can download the free demo to get a taste of what the developers are hoping to achieve with this quirky new fighting game.