One might be forgiven when first booting up Hue to think that the game is simply a clone of Limbo, being greeted by a stark black and white world with a young protagonist and strange happenings going on all around. However, after a brief dream-like introduction with some wonderful voice acting, you’ll find yourself in a sleepy fishing village with the shadowy comparisons thrown to memory.

In Hue you play as the titular character, a young man whose mother has gone missing after discovering a new way of expressing colours. In order to find her, you will need to assemble the colour ring that she was researching so that you can access the full spectrum of colours in the world. This works twofold, being your initial storyline objective but also as the core mechanic of Hue. After collecting your first colour, you gain the ability to bathe the entire world in that colour with a flick of the right thumbstick.



Doing so does so much more than just change your background though, as Hue makes clever use of matching items in the world to the colours you are setting in order to allow your character to slip through areas and manipulate how various parts of the world interact. Got some light blue rocks in your way? Just make the world light blue and have them slip into the background for you to pass. That red boulder about to crush you to death? A red palette swap should do nicely to save your life.

Hue makes clever use of matching items in the world to the colours you are setting in order to allow your character to slip through areas and manipulate how various parts of the world interact.

While making these colour swaps the world slows down considerably, allowing for some very intriguing puzzles that involve you leaping through the air to your certain doom in one colour, only to quickly switch to another for the life-saving platform to appear. Just make sure you don’t have something in another colour blocking your way or you’ll find your colour switch blocked… This is used in greater fashion and quickly ramps up in complexity as you complete more and more of the colour ring.

Puzzles are never too demanding from what you have learned from completing a previous screen or from just taking a brief moment to think about how everything interacts together. Failure is also not as punishing as it could have conceivably been. While Hue is fragile, needing only one hit to be killed, you are quickly brought back to the start of the current screen. And while the odd screen did reset back to a point that was mildly frustrating, these were in the minority.



With your colour ring being complete, the second act takes you away from the little island your village is on to the mainland and the university Hue’s mother worked at before leaving. There are more than a few twists to the tale that you discover through more notes left behind for you, as well as various mysterious figures adding to the intrigue.

However, you do not need to leave any area too quickly, seeing as there are a number of collectibles littered across the areas that may require a little more effort to get to, or in the case of the first act, may require a colour that you have not unlocked yet. Collecting all these beakers across all the areas lengthens out the game and can provide a good challenge to those looking for one.

There are more than a few twists to the tale that you discover through more notes left behind for you...

Audibly Hue has a soundtrack that matches the quaint feel it is going for, never taking over a scene and matching perfectly the more mysterious or stressful scenes. As mentioned before, the voice acting was done very well and helped to expand the lore while also helping to drive a narrative of having an untrustworthy narrator.



While all these items come together to make for a great experience, it is one that does have some areas to keep in mind. Chief among these is the fact that the game is heavily focused on the use of colour and being able to recognise the differences between those colours. This will hamper those with visual issues dealing with the colour spectrum (we had a writer back away as soon as they realised that was a core mechanic for this very reason). For those of us that do not have issues with this, some of the colours on the wheel are still quite close to one another and this can lead to some errors, but through some practice, you’ll be nailing those colours each time.

Overall, Hue is a wonderfully crafted puzzle platformer with an innovative take on how to make the puzzles of the games it is inspired by more interesting. Tight controls and a steady curve make sure that you’ll never feel frustrated while collecting challenging, deviously placed collectibles that will keep you coming back for more, if you’re into those kinds of things. Hue finds a great place to blend into on the Switch which feels like a perfect fit for all its charm and easy pick-up-ability between sessions of play on the go.