Tin Hearts is charming and soulful. review

Played on PlayStation 5

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 kind of gets sad. You can’t find an explanation for the strongly surging melancholy – either the music influences it that way, or the design of the locations, but in any case you’re implicitly waiting for the “tear maker”, even if you haven’t read the description of the game. And if you looked release Fanwhere the cover of the immortal Toy Soldiers song is heard, is ready for anything – one does not expect a happy story with such a project.

glorious past

The environment is primarily to blame. We walk through the workshop of a Victorian inventor where there isn’t a single living soul and we don’t get who at first. Only after a few seconds does the hero gain a transparent body and periodically see the same ghostly figures of himself. be wives and daughters. Is it memories? Did the main character die or return to the house only after many years? There are no direct answers, but pretty quickly you start to suspect something.

The animation of the soldiers isn’t entirely realistic, but you want to watch them all the time

The workshop is very beautiful and realistic. Numerous wooden toys are frozen, unfinished figures lie next to abandoned tools and cans of paint. All tables, shelves and ladders are made of wood, which does not diminish the feeling of warmth and coziness. The developers don’t even have to tell anything about the main character – just look at how much the master invented and showed how much he was in love with his craft. It is all the sadder to find that the rooms have long since been abandoned and the enchanting toys are covered in dust.

The task is always the same: find a small box, open it and free the tin soldiers from there. They start moving forward without turning anywhere and we have to put obstacles in their way to get the department to the door. First of all, these are figurines with engraved symbols – it is impossible to make a mistake and insert something in the wrong place. Then ordinary figures will appear, which you can place anywhere. The farther away, the more elements appear for you to interact with: cannons that fire once, toy trains that move on rails, turntables that rotate even indoors, and so on.

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

The game grows fast with handy options missing in the first puzzles. You can move freely around the rooms, speed up, rewind and pause time, and later even control one of the soldiers. At such moments, you need to lock the rest between two obstacles – they won’t stop marching, and when you want to turn back time, the soldier you control will start moving in the opposite direction. Sometimes restarting the whole level is easier than trying 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 difficulty jumps – while some puzzles are more complicated than others, you don’t have to hang on to them for too long. You solve something using the “reverse” method, approaching the target door and building a path from there. On the contrary, you start to unravel something with soldiers from the side of the box. Sometimes you move obstacles from one place to another when the soldiers have already gone half the way and there aren’t enough pieces and you have to take the ones you used before. And it happens that the game offers more options than are actually necessary.

If you stop time, a hint bar will appear showing you where the soldiers are going and what they will meet

step march

Basically, you do the same thing throughout the game, but Tin Hearts doesn’t bother you. Even if you visit some rooms for the second time, the puzzles there turn out to be completely different, and new mechanics can appear all of a sudden – either you drop loads from the platform so that it rises, or you shoot cannons at toys- airships, or you scare a bird in the garden that prevents you from getting past the birdhouse. In the second half of the game, complex mechanisms emerge – 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, look at scenes with the participation of spirits – memories that appear in the main character. These episodes are very organically tied into the gameplay and not drawn out, and the story turns out to be intriguing. The protagonist – the inventor Albert Butterworth – works for his own pleasure and creates unusual products when he is suddenly invited to a mysterious closed society, a kind of toy guild. He politely declines the offer, but the members of the fraternity (and that’s what they call themselves) won’t give up. Albert is soon confronted with family problems, but the further development of the story is better experienced in the game itself – it’s worth it.

In story episodes you can watch the characters, but you can still solve puzzles and listen to the dialogues in the background

All the 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 infinitely charming – so much so that you want to take the “little man” off the screen and put it on the shelf. The environment looks great outside of the workshop too – exploring the rest of the rooms in the house is no less interesting, and the ability to zoom in with the camera and examine the details is constantly used. After that, the game will get support for VR helmets, which will certainly make training mandatory for all owners of such devices.

Complaints only seem to management – not so serious as to spoil the impression, but still some inconveniences arise. Either you cannot move freely in space due to interfering objects, or the game makes these objects “invisible” and allows you to pass through them. Either the obstacle figure lies in the desired place, then it immediately disappears and moves to its original position. But you quickly get used to the circumstances of each level, and there are so many surprises and interesting ideas that there is no time for indignation at 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 managing a number of creatures are appropriate, the novelty still looks very unusual and unique – both in terms of the visual component and in terms of the brilliant combination of story and gameplay. It’s hard to miss the amount of warmth and love that went into this project, resulting in an unforgettable adventure that I would recommend to everyone.

Advantages:

• a sentimental yet unassuming story;
• charming soldiers march through beautiful places – all this one wants to think carefully about and study;
• quite diverse puzzles due to the constant emergence of new mechanics and the unusual use of old mechanics;
• Puzzles get harder and harder, but never seem unsolvable;
• touching soundtrack.

Defects:

• Management is not always perfect.

Score: 9.0/10

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