Overall it was intuitive, but I did find myself getting uncoordinated from time to time and ending up either spinning in a circle, crashing into the ocean floor, or getting stuck in tight corners where there was less space to correct any tilt error I made. Instead of moving with the joystick, you use the joystick to tilt or angle your direction and the ZR button to actually swim around. From here you get a quick tutorial on the the controls.
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Cut to meeting your character, The Diver, who is floating in the middle of the water. Follow on Twitter for updates.The game starts first with a cinematic intro that is very intriguing, and gives you a sense that this isn’t just an ocean-scape exploration game. You Should Be Playing celebrates innovative, unexpected games that belong on your radar, with a new game every Monday at 0900 PST / 1700 GMT. When I was playing it I felt present, not planning too far ahead or straining against a specific challenge. The result is game that is beautiful but not so mesmerizing you get lost, considerate but never simple. Take the mental calisthenics of Portal and marry them to a molasses smooth, slow version of Super Meat Boy’s platforming and you can get an idea of the feel at Hue’s core. Hue could quickly become frustrating or tedious if its puzzles were more oblique, but it strikes an elegant balance between true brain busters and push-over challenges.
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Switching to blue may make a purple box appear, though, so you have to alternate to clear a path. If you need to clear a blue box in front of you, switch the world to blue to make it vanish. Doing so involves finding those new colors, each of them primary, and selecting them from a wheel to change the look of the world. Grey-it’s not all subtle-and you’re ostensibly trying to reach her. She’s no longer visible in your spectrum thanks to dealings with the mysterious Dr. As a mysterious companion tells you through narrated letters found in the game as you jump through its silhouette caves, towns, and weird forests, there are more colors in the world than you can readily perceive. Rather than an atmospheric choice, though, the lack of color and definition in Hue is central to the game’s story and play. Like Playdead’s famous horror comedy, Hue also stars a non-descript shadow boy who’s more outline with big eyes than a defined person, matching an equally grey and dreary world. From the outside it looks like another entry in the long line of art platformers that have sprung up in the past decade, most specifically Limbo.
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It takes playing Hue to appreciate its subtle pleasures, though. Gliding over Hue’s delicately detailed platforms, taking its hushed world and manipulating colors to reveal new facets of the environment readily guides you into that state present, thoughtful, but not so demanding that your conscious mind is fixated. Contradictory by its very nature, meditation requires you to both by wholly inattentive but wholly present, willing to let stray thoughts slide off your consciousness like so much water off a duck while staying awake and even alert. We take slow-paced exploration like No Man’s Sky or low stakes, high atmosphere style pieces like Abzu (which has a literal meditation button in it), and we equate their steady pacing to the act of deep breathing and chanting, “Om.” The actual practice of meditating is difficult, though. Gaming and meditation are acts linked together regularly when discussing thoughtful games that veer hard away from the kinetic twitchiness or grand theatrics of big budget hits. Hue, an arty and unassuming platformer by Fiddlestick Games, is one of the most pleasurably meditative games I’ve played in the past year.