REVIEW | Tin Hearts (Tidbit-style)

We love all sorts of games. Sometimes it is hard to cover a game in our traditional review style that’s why we have tidbit-style reviews. These shorter reviews cover games that deserve attention too but simply don’t fit our good, mixed, and bad template. In addition, they get a monthly summary article to give them even more reader attention!

Tin Hearts | Score 80%
Publisher: Wired Productions
Developer: Rogue Sun

In Tin Hearts, you create a path for little toy soldiers. You do this by moving toys so your cute little friends bounce in the right direction. If you think that sounds easy you are actually right, but things become more complex the longer you play. The puzzles are extraordinarily well-designed and integrated with the level design. A bedroom at first but it opens up with some huge open spaces and enough secrets for replay value and exploration. A handful of gameplay mechanics introduced along the way keep the game fresh and fun. It remains immensely charming and finding the solutions to guide everyone safely and securely to the exit is very rewarding.

The game captures the player’s hearts not with soldiers but mainly with the exceptionally emotional and beautiful music. Graphically it is also very detailed and lifelike, sometimes it is like watching a movie that you control. Important to know is that you don’t manually control the tor soldiers, they follow a predetermined path that you can alter. You do control the main character and freely walk around the environment, searching for puzzle pieces to change the path. Later on, you do have the ability to control a toy soldier directly, and here is where things really get interesting. You have side missions to help the others march forward. There is little negative to be said but there’s one giant issue with Tin Hearts, camera movement. The game has a weird habit to zoom in on blocks that you select, making it a little confusing and it made me a bit nauseous.

A small hiccup along the way. Everything else about Tin Hearts is all positive! Especially emotional storytelling is not something you see every day in this kind of game.