Hue Review

It’s always irritating when an evil entity banishes you from your home world and rids the world of all its colour, leaving you hidden from society in a colour-void purgatory. Fortunately, titular character Hue is on hand to restore the world’s vividity.

Hue offers a highly unique take on puzzling, allowing you to switch the colour of the environment in order to manipulate platforms, obstructions and other objects around the level. Matching the colour of the background to the colour of objects makes those objects disappear, allowing you to progress into areas that otherwise would be inaccessible. This unique twist on the genre immediately feels impressive, and unlike anything seen before on the Switch eShop.

As you progress, more background colours are added to your palette, meaning that puzzles become ever more complex. For example, in one puzzle, you’re required to manoeuvre coloured boxes into position as to be used as stairs to higher platforms; however, to be able to move them at all, even if just to the other side of another box, you must manipulate the environment and change its colour to the colour of the box that you’re trying to pass through.

This increasing complexity makes some puzzles quite tricky to pull off. You might be required to jump and switch the background colour in mid-air in order to pass through blocks, and then have them reappear on the way down to give you a platform to land on. Others are set-out as maze-like labyrinths, requiring that you choose your colour changes carefully in order to open up new paths to collect keys before backtracking and making the critical colour-changing decisions to send you in the direction of the level-ending door.

The most difficult challenge to be found in the game, however, is jumping between blocks that crumble the moment you land on them. Having to think quickly to switch the background colours in the split-second that you’re in the air is tricky without a calm and focused mind, and the game is designed cleverly enough to ensure that it’s not a simple case of remembering a simple pattern in the order of the colour changes.

No, you’ll have to take on every jump on its own merit. Luckily, using the right stick to bring up the wheel to change the colour works well and feels intuitive, and memorising the locations of the colours on your wheel will help improve your speed somewhat. Be careful as you navigate each level and change the background colour, though, as an often surprising consequence of making all objects of that colour disappear from your screen is that boulders or other dangerous objects may fall on you from above.

With its striking, dark-to-colourful look, Hue is undeniably a pretty game. Playing smoothly irrespective of whether you’re out and about or parked in front of your TV, it is certainly possible to lose yourself in its atmosphere. Though character models are basic, the use of voice-acting and smooth music does give the game a sense of personality.

But those aren’t the aspects where Hue shines most – this is a game which is all about its colour-based puzzling ideas. Though short, Hue is a game worth checking out for its unique puzzling gimmick. With neat ideas and a satisfying level of difficulty as you near the end, this is a good one for testing your skills on the Switch.