Hue is a simple puzzle game, that tries to be deep and emotional, some kind of “art game”. The game focus on an innovative gameplay, different puzzles, and an emotional story to try to catch the player’s attention.
The game’s mechanics are pretty simple: you jump, and you select colors using the right stick. Each time you select a color, the background changes to this color, and any element that had this color disappear. For example, a blue block disappears when you turn the screen blue, but it will reappear again if you turn the screen red. This allows the player to temporary vanish obstacles and dangers, so as to solve puzzles and progress through the levels.
Simple, yet innovative and nice. The puzzles aren’t very hard, and most of them can be solved with just a couple minutes of thinking. Some of them can even get a little boring, because you will see a solution relatively fast, but the execution can take a while. However, as you progress through the levels, new elements are added, such as lasers, balloons and others, which succeeds in keeping the game interesting.
Even though the game is simple, it has its flaws. In a few levels, where you need to be quick in selecting the next color, the right stick is not the best option and you will probably die for selecting the wrong color by accident. Also, I strongly recommend playing with the colorblind mode turned on: there are two or three colors that can be easily confused.
The graphics are perhaps the game’s weak point. Even though you don’t need great graphics for a game like this, for an art game I was expecting a little more. The colors are very nice, for sure, but the drawings are somewhat simple. The music, however, is just as good as it would be expected from a game like this and helps a lot in setting the mood.
The story is the supposed to be one of the game’s main attractions. And it goes really well, until close to the end. The story is deep, but the end is somewhat too mysterious. It looks like the developers wanted to make a surprising, deep, with a plot twist end. However, in my opinion this led to a hard to understand end, which is just way too open and unexplained. This is really a pity, because until this point it really is a touching, deep, and emotional story.
The game also has some collectibles. They can be somewhat hard to find, and especially boring to look for. One of the worst things in the game is that sometimes you have to go back to an area later in the game if you want a collectible, because when you first reach that area, you don’t have the color you need. This means doing a lot from the puzzles again, just to reach that point. The same thing happens if you miss a collectible and has to go back for it.
In the end, HUE is a nice art puzzle game, which is worth playing. However, it is just not good enough to be a classic or a “must play” game, mainly because of some small details which end up having a big importance. For that, I give it 4 stars.
4.0