One day, the developers of Organ Trail, The Men Who Wear Many Hats, received an intriguing e-mail regarding penis pills. The subject line read: Max Gentlemen. Evidently, the two-person team (they do sport numerous hats, after all) felt compelled to create a game inspired by this rather absurd phrase.
“We never actually read that e-mail; rather, we envisioned the world of Max Gentlemen,” the developer elucidated on their successful Kickstarter campaign from last November. So, what exactly does the phrase “Max Gentlemen” signify to The Men Who Wear Many Hats?
It sparked the studio’s concept to develop “an arcade-style extreme manners simulator centered around stacking hats.” An abundance of hats. So many. Hats indeed.
This manifests in a variety of mini-games where you find yourself engaged in brawling, picnicking, riding in a stagecoach, and being launched out of a cannon, all in the pursuit of acquiring more hats while deftly avoiding obstacles that could topple your hat stack.
Initially crafted for an arcade cabinet during a game jam, this experimental jest game garnered a plethora of positive responses, leading the Chicago-based indie studio to crowdfund it for a commercial release.
Now, Max Gentlemen is available as a complimentary offering on PC, Mac, and Linux via Steam, as well as on iOS and Android devices.
If you wish to financially support The Men Who Wear Many Hats, you can always purchase additional items and stages in a couple of small £1.99 DLC packs. These encompass new characters such as Octodad and Vlambeer’s Rami Ismail as a stylish bear.
Eurogamer contributor Rich Stanton was an ardent admirer of The Men Who Wear Many Hats’ previous mobile game, Organ Trail. “Organ Trail is an outstanding concept, and its execution elevates it far beyond a mere macabre tribute. It’s not that any individual element is exceptionally remarkable, but rather the world they collectively create – a low-fi apocalypse that is eerie precisely because so much of it is left to the imagination,” he wrote in his App of the Day assessment.
