Top Hat Willy is an homage to the famous Jet Set Willy, a notoriously difficult flick-screen platform game with lots of screens. Guide Willy around his vast and very strange mansion, filled with death traps and dangerous creatures such as rolling razors, bunnyrabbits and flying TV sets, to collect his flashing items. A score panel on the bottom keeps track of how many of the many rooms Willy has explored and how many items have been picked up.

Even though THW makes some use of the Amiga's large colour palette, it remains true to its ZX Spectrum inspiration, so that each enemy is a single colour (or a single hue), dividing the screen in distinct 8x8 pixel blocks with separate colours for each block and having a black background.