Indie games and physics go pretty well together, and over the last few years we’ve seen a number of interesting games that utilize some kind of ‘switch gimmick’ (and that’s not meant to sound condescending) to alter the player’s world in order to basically get from point A to B. Games like Limbo, Portal, Constant C, The Bridge, Contrast, echochrome, and many more, are based on some kind of property that the player can manipulate. Sometimes it’s light and shadow, other times its gravity, you get the idea; Hue, as its name suggests, uses color as its ‘hook.’
A good hook alone is not enough to make a good game or make it sustainable, and fortunately Hue addresses this right from the start. This game, weighing in at only 260MB by the way, has a nice story to go with it that unfolds as you progress through the different chapters. The story is told via letters that you cannot miss and they’re read aloud with good voice-acting while you are making your way in between two major areas by doing some simple and safe platforming. These letters are from your character’s mother. She and her college love interest Dr. Grey had been studying colors, including invisible colors, those colors that exist somewhere in between the ones we can see. Unfortunately, something in their studies and experiments went wrong and she’s now trapped in this invisible spectrum, and has written these letters hoping that you can help. A device called the annular spectrum, a sort of color wheel, must be used to turn the world, which simultaneously turned grey, back to normal.
The adventure begins at a seaside dock and you’re immediately treated to some whimsical 2D artwork that’s pretty charming. It goes along very well with the soft piano soundtrack that provides a much needed and enjoyable score to work through the puzzles with. Controls are intuitive and brief — walk with the left stick, jump with X, push and pull boxes with square, and, soon enough, you start wielding color changing powers that are accessed with the right stick.
Hue begins humbly and easily enough. Indeed the first couple of hours or so go by really smoothly as you encounter one puzzle room after another, with the goal always being to enter door A and exit door B, sometimes with a key to find in between. It’s the variety of obstacles and well, puzzles, in these rooms that becomes increasingly impressive and challenging as you proceed, with new elements like boxes, spike traps, lasers, trampolines, balloons, and other such things getting introduced at a steady and refreshing rate. The goal remains the same as you go from wielding your first color to your final, eighth one — get Hue out of the room and don’t take any damage (one hit kill kind of game) in the process. You can restart a room instantly if you desire and the game seems to constantly save your progress in the background as you go from room to room.
So what exactly are you doing within the rooms? Well, Hue’s main feature is using the colors to change the background of the game world which then also makes any object of the same color disappear. This disappearing act is not only from visual site though, the object literally does not exist anymore when you change to that color. So say for example you had a box you needed to move past a rock. The box is orange, the wall is purple, the only way to get the box past the purple wall is to use the color wheel to change the background to purple which makes the purple wall suddenly irrelevant and you can walk right on through. As you can quickly surmise, this color shifting is used to great effect with a impressive variety of traps and jigsaw puzzle and platforming-based puzzles. Typically, timing is not a major issue in that there is no time limit, the music is fittingly calm, and you don’t need twitch reflexes to get through, but indeed the opposite is true at times as well.
For me, the puzzles ramped up in difficulty at a pretty smooth rate. At first I was clearing rooms rapidly, with each more challenging room having a logical outcome that I could predict and work through in relatively short order. This was pleasing and rewarding, but eventually I got to a point where a single room was taking a minimum of fifteen minutes or so and, as is typical with me and physics puzzle games, my play sessions began to shrink. Such is the case with Hue and where I am at in the game now. From what I can tell from the Map which you can view at anytime in the pause menu, I am most of the way through and overall it’s been enjoyable.
In sum, Hue presents an accessible, familiar, yet unique-enough experience that is absolutely worth checking out if you’re a fan of this genre. I would even suggest that if you got burned out by similar games that got too hard too fast to give Hue a chance.
