BattleBlock Theater opens with a shipwreck, a storm, and a narrator who never stops talking. The Behemoth’s third game, following Alien Hominid and Castle Crashers, strands the crew of the S.S. Friendship on an abandoned island and hands the player a simple job: run, jump, punch, survive.
It shipped on Xbox Live Arcade on April 3, 2013, then came to Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It was briefly free through Games with Gold on July 16, 2014. On July 26, 2024, The Behemoth announced a quality-of-life update and future console releases. More than a decade on, the game still earns its place.
Trailer, via The Behemoth.
Hatty Hattington and the S.S. Friendship
The story is told almost entirely through stick puppet cut-scenes, narrated by Will Stamper. The S.S. Friendship wrecks in a heavy storm. The crew vanishes. The player wakes, shelters in a dilapidated theater, and finds evolved cats restraining Hatty Hattington — “best friend to one and all” — as they fit him with a glowing top hat.
The hat changes him. He alerts the cats, attacks the player, and takes charge. The crew is imprisoned. The player is released from a cell and forced into deadly theater performances while the feline wardens watch.
Later, the narrator explains the theater’s history. Purrham Furbottom, a theatrical aficionado, built it hundreds of years earlier. Opening night made it an overnight success. Furbottom banned intermissions, and died after “pooping himself to death on the way to the bathroom.” His top hat passed to successive leaders, each revered by the cats, each meeting a grim fate. The narrator theorizes the hat is haunted by the grief of every past wearer.
the hat is haunted by the grief and sorrow of each of its past wearers
That is the whole game in one line. Hatty sinks into depression surrounded by gems, doing nothing for the theater. The cats riot and strike. The player enters The Vault, breaks into Hatty’s throne room, and carries him out as the crew stages a mass breakout. They escape by boat. The narrator sings a sad song, then an upbeat one, rocks the boat, and flings Hatty into the sea. The hat glows green, fires a beam skyward, sends the boat flying, and vaporizes a bear. The narrator claims to understand. He does not explain.
Running, Jumping and Punching
The controls are simple. BattleBlock Theater is running, jumping and punching, and it never pretends otherwise. Levels are built from collapsing blocks, sticky walls, bouncy volcanic rocks and deadly spikes, plus hazards like water and deadly creatures.
Story Mode runs solo or co-op. Normal mode gives checkpoints; insane mode gives none, so a death restarts the level. Co-op lets players throw each other across gaps, use heads as platforms, and boost each other up ledges. It also invites sabotage. Both are the point.
Gems gate progress and buy customizable parts. Yarn bribes cat guards and unlocks weapons. Each world ends in a timed ‘Finale’ boss level, which unlocks the next chapter and three optional ‘Encore’ levels for the one just beaten. Levels can also be skipped, so a chapter does not require every main level.
What the Gems Buy
The structure rewards the wrong instinct. Players hoard gems to unlock crew members and cosmetics, then spend yarn on weapons, and the game keeps its difficulty curve honest through the Finale fights. Insane mode is where the design shows its teeth. No checkpoints turns every collapsing block and spike into a real decision.
The co-op is the best thing here. Throwing a partner across a gap and using their head as a platform are not gimmicks bolted on. They are the levels. The same systems let a friend drop you into spikes, which is either the funniest or cruelest thing in the game depending on who is holding the controller.
The stick puppet cut-scenes hold up. Stamper’s narrator carries the comedy, and the theater’s backstory — Furbottom, the intermission ban, the hat’s lineage — gives the jokes somewhere to land. A lesser game would use the cats as generic enemies. This one gives them a labor dispute.
The ending is the boldest choice. The narrator rescues the crew, then punts Hatty into the ocean and fires a hat beam into space to kill a bear. It refuses to explain itself and returns to the title screen. That is a joke about closure, and it works because the game never asked to be taken seriously.
What Holds Up, What Doesn’t
Ranked by what BattleBlock Theater does best:
- Co-op level design that makes teamwork and betrayal the same mechanic.
- The narrator and stick puppet cut-scenes, which carry the story past its thin premise.
- Insane mode, which turns simple controls into genuine pressure.
- The gem and yarn economy, which is functional but never the reason to play.
The weak spot is solo play. Without a second player, the levels are still sharp, but the sabotage and rescue that define co-op disappear, and the campaign leans on the narrator to fill the gap. The gem grind for cosmetics also pads a game that does not need padding.
None of that sinks it. The Behemoth built a platformer around one clean idea — simple moves, hostile rooms — and then wrote a comedy around a cursed hat. The 2024 update announcement suggests the studio still sees life in it.
BattleBlock Theater is not the deepest platformer of its era. It is one of the funniest, and its co-op still holds. 8.9/10.
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