“Tin Hearts: An Unforgettable Puzzle Adventure Through a Victorian Workshop”

Tin Hearts feels weird at first. It seems that nothing is happening in the story yet – you solve simple puzzles and read tooltips – but your heart becomes somehow sad. You can’t find an explanation for the sharply surging melancholy – either the music has such an effect, or the design of the locations, but in any case, you are implicitly waiting for a “tear extractor”, even if you haven’t read the description of the game. And if you looked release trailerwhere the cover of the immortal song of Toy Soldiers sounds, is ready for anything – you don’t expect to see a happy story in such a project.

⇡#glorious past

First of all, the entourage is to blame. We walk through the workshop of a Victorian inventor, in which there is not a single living soul, and we even manage at first it is not clear who. Only after a few seconds the hero acquires a transparent body and periodically sees the same ghostly figures of himself, his wives and daughters. Is it memories? Did the main character die, or just returned to the house after many years? There are no direct answers, but pretty quickly you begin to suspect something.

The workshop turns out to be very beautiful and realistic. Numerous wooden toys are frozen in place, unfinished figurines lie next to abandoned tools and paint cans. All tables, shelves and ladders are made of wood, thanks to which the feeling of warmth and comfort does not leave. The developers don’t even have to tell anything about the main character – just look at how much the master invented and manufactured to understand how much he was in love with his craft. It is all the more sad to realize that the rooms have long been abandoned, and the charming toys are covered with dust.

The task is always the same: find a small box, open it and release tin soldiers from there. They begin to move forward without turning anywhere, and we are required to put obstacles in their way in order to bring the detachment to the door. At first, these are figures with symbols carved on them – it is impossible to make a mistake and insert something in the wrong place. Then ordinary figures appear, which you are free to place anywhere. The farther, the more elements appear with which you can interact: cannons that shoot once, toy trains moving along rails, turntables that spin even indoors, and so on.

In order for the level to be considered passed, it is enough to bring only one soldier to the door, but usually there are no problems with “rescuing” everyone at once

The game quickly grows with convenient options that are missing in the first riddles. You will be able to freely move around the rooms, speed up time, rewind it and pause it, and later you will even be allowed to control one of the soldiers. At such moments, you need to lock the rest between two obstacles – they do not stop marching, and if you want to rewind time, then the soldier you control will begin to move in the opposite direction. Sometimes it’s easier to restart the entire level than to try to return the missing men.

At first, the puzzles seem too easy, but then it becomes more and more difficult. A big plus is that there are no jumps in difficulty – even if some puzzles are more intricate than others, you don’t have to hang over them for too long. You solve something using the “opposite” method, approaching the finish door and building a path from it. Something, on the contrary, you begin to unravel from the side of the box with soldiers. Sometimes you transfer obstacles from one place to another, when the soldiers have already gone half way, and there are not enough figures and you need to take the ones that were used earlier. And it happens that the game provides more options than actually required.

When you stop time, a clue path appears, allowing you to understand where the soldiers will go and what they will hit

⇡#step march

The whole game, in fact, you do the same thing, but Tin Hearts does not bother you. Even when you visit some rooms for the second time, the puzzles there turn out to be completely different, and new mechanics can appear quite suddenly – either you drop loads from the platform so that it rises, or you shoot cannons at toy airships, or you scare a bird in the yard, which prevents you from passing by the birdhouse. In the second half of the game, complex mechanisms appear – the most ingenious and ambitious inventions of the protagonist, which do not look as pretty as wooden toys, but still impress.

In parallel with solving puzzles, you watch scenes with the participation of ghosts – memories that appear in the main character. These episodes are very organically woven into the gameplay and are not drawn out, and the story turns out to be fascinating. The protagonist – inventor Albert Butterworth – works for his own pleasure and makes unusual products, when suddenly he is invited to a mysterious closed society, a kind of toy guild. He politely declines the offer, but the members of the fraternity (and they call themselves that) do not let up. Soon, Albert is faced with family problems, but it is better to learn about the further development of the story in the game itself – it’s worth it.

In story episodes, you can watch the figures, or you can continue to solve puzzles and listen to dialogue in the background

All elements of Tin Hearts are combined in such a wonderful way that it is impossible not to fall in love with the game. Soldiers are endlessly charming – so much so that you want to get the “little man” out of the screen and put it on your shelf. The environment looks great even outside the workshop – exploring the rest of the rooms in the house is no less interesting, and the ability to zoom in on the camera and examine the details is a constant use. Subsequently, the game will acquire support for VR helmets, which will certainly make it mandatory for all owners of such devices to familiarize themselves.

Claims appear only to management – not so serious that the impression is spoiled, but still some inconveniences arise. Either you can’t move freely around the room due to interfering objects, or the game makes these objects “invisible” and allows you to pass through them. Either the obstacle figure lies where you want, then it immediately evaporates and moves to its original position. But you quickly get used to the conditions at each specific level, besides, there are so many surprises and interesting ideas that there is no time left for indignation due to minor flaws.

Even forks and spoons can become obstacles, but you can’t move them

***

Tin Hearts is a great puzzle game that you hope never ends. And although comparisons with Lemmings and other games about the management of a string of creatures beg, the novelty still seems very unusual and unique – both in terms of the visual component, and in how brilliantly the story and gameplay are combined. It is hard not to notice how much warmth and love was invested in this project, which resulted in an unforgettable adventure that I want to recommend to everyone.

Advantages:

• a sentimental and at the same time unobtrusive story;
• charming soldiers are marching through beautiful locations – you want to carefully consider and study all this;
• quite diverse puzzles due to the constant emergence of new mechanics and the unusual use of old ones;
• riddles become more and more difficult, but never seem unsolvable;
• touching soundtrack.

Flaws:

• management is not always perfect.

Rating: 9,0/10

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