Recently I played a game in my Nintendo Switch called Hue.
Hue is a puzzle game based around colours and perceptions. You start in a world in grayscale, and slowly you unlock new colours. Each colour is a piece for the colour ring your mother built, and allows you to see the world in a different colour. This uncovers new doors, bridges and hints, but also obstacles in the form of walls, blocks and lasers. The idea is that, as you find new colours, you start learning to switch between them to make your obstacles disappear and uncover new parts of the landscape that help you.
Personally, I really enjoyed the puzzles in this game. They always made me think at least a bit, and they were hard sometimes, but I was never stuck in any of them. The puzzles hit the right spot to make me feel smart and capable, not too easy and not too hard, and they were fun to think through and find the solutions.
The story was a bit hard to follow sometimes. It would leave many questions open, or at least I didn’t find a concrete answer for them, and I was a bit frustrated by that. This caused the story to be clearly emotional and enjoyable, but a bit unsatisfactory as I could see that the larger emotional points didn’t hit as hard as I thought they should have, presumably because I didn’t understand the story well enough – although admittedly I may not have payed enough attention to the letters written by the mom and the dad in order to fully appreciate the emotions in the story.
Maybe because of that, the atmosphere and the music of the game felt excessively sad given the content of the story. Don’t get me wrong, I can enjoy a sad, calm and emotional atmosphere, and I really enjoyed this one very often. However, sometimes it felt overly sad, sometimes I felt tired of the constant sad atmosphere and I didn’t understand why it was like that. I guess the idea is that your mom has disappeared and obviously that is sad. I think it didn’t feel that way because you’re often hearing her voice and listening to her tell her story, while the main character is a bit of a blank slate (kind of like Link from The Legend of Zelda), so you never really feel like she is missing because she’s the main personality in the game.
Aside from that, I’d say I really liked the music on its own. I found it beautiful in its own way, and I think I could listen to it while I work or study in my day-to-day.
Looking at the story in a more general sense, I really liked the philosophical message it transmitted. The idea that our perceptions are shaped more by ourselves than by the world itself is not that new, at least not to me, (“we don’t see the world as it is, but as we are”), but I think the way in which it transmitted that message was really interesting and effective. I loved trying new colours and seeing different obstacles and aids, and I think it conveyed effectively the feeling that different perspectives are completely world-changing and within ourselves at the same time, and that usually you need several of them to work around a puzzle. Both the mechanics and the content of the mother’s letters help you understand this deeply.
Overall, Hue is short and fun, the puzzles are really enjoyable and the mechanic is creative and effectively used. The story may miss the mark slightly on the emotional side, but it has a broader philosophical message that ties everything together and makes the mechanic even more purposeful. Both me and my girlfriend give the game a 4/5, and I really recommend playing it!