I once thought the idea of finding color in an otherwise monochrome life was a neat metaphor. These days, I find it a little trite. The concept probably reached its peak with H.P. Lovecraft’s The Colour Out of Space—a horror tale about an extraterrestrial entity of an impossible hue crashing into a well, slowly draining all life and color from its surroundings. How on earth would you even fight something like that?
The great thing about Fiddlesticks Games’ Hue is that it doesn’t try to. Nor does it burden itself with grand thematic pretensions. Instead, it uses color as a clever, elegant puzzle mechanic, while quietly unfolding a personal story about a mother trying to reconnect with her son, Hue, whom you control. Her story is told through voice-narrated letters found between levels, centering on a conflict with one Dr. Grey and her eventual disappearance into an unknown color. To reach her, you must leave your home village and climb to the highest floor of the university—a journey that is anything but straightforward.
The result is one of the most engaging puzzle-platformers I’ve played in years, built on intuitive logic and a simple yet striking presentation, underscored by a gently melancholic soundtrack. It feels indie in the best sense of the word: focused, confident, and unafraid of restraint. You can ignore the story entirely without losing any enjoyment—the gameplay stands perfectly well on its own. Mood, pacing, and challenge do the heavy lifting.
You begin the game wielding a large ring once owned by your mother, capable of absorbing different hues. When you acquire a new color, you can use the ring like a weapon wheel to change the background to that hue. Any object sharing that color doesn’t merely become invisible—it ceases to exist until you change the background again. A red wall blocking your path? Turn the world red and walk straight through. What you cannot see does not exist.
This deceptively simple mechanic supports five to six hours of increasingly ingenious puzzles. You’ll navigate rooms filled with color-spraying blocks, balloons that cause objects to levitate until they vanish, and deadly laser beams that must interact with color-coded sensors in precise sequences. Each element has a clear visual identity, and solving a room often means activating and deactivating systems in the correct order.
Some stages reward careful planning; others are pure timing challenges, forcing you to switch colors on the fly as boulders thunder toward you down narrow corridors. Not only are the individual rooms brilliantly designed, they’re arranged with such care that the difficulty curve feels almost eerily perfect. The minimal visual language and seamlessly integrated tutorials make learning feel organic—you can practically sense your problem-solving skills sharpening as you progress.
This is not a life-altering experience, but it is deeply satisfying. Hue delights in presenting you with seemingly impossible situations, then calmly letting you dismantle them step by step. Most levels encourage experimentation, and the few that don’t are direct and readable enough to avoid frustration.
It shares the same playful ingenuity I remember from classic puzzle games like Lemmings and Pushover. Revisiting those older titles today often reveals how padded they were—endless filler levels dressed up with new music or backgrounds. Hue avoids that pitfall entirely. Here, variation is never cosmetic. In this world, color isn’t decoration—it’s everything.
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