I thought the idea of finding color in your previously monochrome life was a
neat metaphor when I first heard of it, but by now I find it a little trite. I
think the idea reached its peak with H.P. Lovecraft's horror tale
Color Out of Space, about an extraterrestrial being of a never before
seen color crashing into a deep well, only to turn everything around it sick
and grey by sucking all life out of it. How on Earth would you fight that?
The great thing about Fiddlesticks Games' brilliant Hue is
that it makes no attempt to, nor is it overly pretentious about its thematic
ramifications. It just uses color as a clever puzzle mechanic, all the while
letting us in on a piece-by-piece narration about a mother trying to reconnect
with her son, Hue, whom you control. You reveal her story through
voice-narrated letters you find between levels. It's all about her quarrel
with one Dr. Grey, and her subsequent disappearance into an unknown color. To
reach her, you need to leave your home village and climb to the highest floor
of the university, but the way there is long and not so straight.
The resulting game is one of the most intriguing puzzle-platformers I've ever
played, one of easily grasped logics and a simple yet effective presentation
highlighted by a soothing melancholic soundtrack. It feels "indie" in the best
sense of the word, as it is both accessible and challenging in story as well as
gameplay. And you can disregard the story altogether without losing an ounce
of enjoyment. The combination of mood, pacing and challenge is more than
enough.
You start the game wielding a big ring, one your mother once
possessed, with the power to absorb different hues. Once you find a new color
you can use the ring like a weapon-wheel to change the background into that hue, which makes all
objects of that color not only invisible - they straight up
disappear until you change the background again. Is a red wall blocking your
way? Just turn the background red and you can pass right through. What you cannot see, doesn't exist.
This simple mechanic can be used in so many ways, with objects behaving in all
sorts of ways, that it supports five or six hours of mind-bending,
quick-thinking and head-scratching. Imagine trying to make sense of a room
with blocks spraying color-altering ink everywhere, balloons making objects
levitate until you make them disappear, and deadly laser beams that open
certain doors upon contact with certain sensors. All these have a specific
color, and you need to activate and de-activate them in a certain order to
clear the stage.
Some rooms require planning and pushing, others are straight-up timing
gauntlets that force you to change colors on the fly as big rolling rocks
chase you down a slope. Not only are the individual rooms brilliantly
conceived, they arrive in an order so carefully playtested they make the
difficulty curve almost eerily perfect. The graphical language is so
minimalistic, and every tutorial so well-disguised, you can almost feel your
mental faculties expand as you progress through the game.
Do not expect a life-altering experience, but it is thought-provoking in the
best sense of the word. It breaks you down by presenting a room full of
seemingly insurmountable obstacles, but allows you to pick yourself up and
work yourself to the exit step by step. Most levels give you time to
experiment with the effects of different color clashes, and the ones that
don't are straightforward enough.
Hue shares the same sense of fun I remember from classic puzzlers like
Lemmings (1991) and Pushover (1992). But upon returning to such
oldies, you often realize how much of them you filtered out, and how little
game designers knew about pacing back then. So many levels were just fillers;
iterations of previous ones with nothing but superficial stuff like new
background art or music to keep you playing. Hue is much better than that.
After all, in this universe, the color of the background is
central to your success.
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