Hue’s colour-switching puzzle platformer turns a grey world vivid, a decade on

Hue is a puzzle platformer that asks you to solve problems by deleting the world. You play as a boy hunting for his missing mother in a land that has forgotten colour, and the only tool you get is a ring that changes the background. Match a wall to the colour behind it and the wall stops existing. Change the colour again and it comes back.

Fiddlesticks developed the game. Curve Digital published it. It hit PlayStation 4, Xbox One and PC on 30 August 2016, then PlayStation Vita on 29 November 2016, and Nintendo Switch on 6 June 2019. It reached iOS on 25 January 2020 and Android on 22 April 2020. It is a side-scrolling puzzle platform game, single player, and it runs on a simple, sharp idea.

Trailer, via Curve Games.

Anne’s Ring and the Annular Spectrum

The story starts with Anne, a researcher who studies colour theory. She builds a ring called the Annular Spectrum, meant to let a person perceive and change colour. After a fracas with her research assistant, she vanishes into a coloured void. The game says she turned an “impossible colour” because the Annular Spectrum fractured.

Her son, Hue, goes looking for her. Anna Acton voices Anne. Hue finds fragments of his mother’s research and learns, for the first time, to see and alter colour. The land he crosses is grey and dangerous. He digs up coloured fragments as he goes.

That setup is thin, and Hue does not pretend otherwise. The game wants the mechanic to carry the story, and for long stretches it does. A boy who can only find his mother by learning the thing she spent her life on is a clean idea. The game rarely says more than that.

Eight Shards, Eight Colours

Hue collects eight shards over the course of the game. The colours are aqua, navy, purple, pink, orange, red, yellow and green. They sit in a colour wheel. Pick a shard and the background takes that colour.

That is the whole trick, and it is a good one. Elements painted the same colour as the background stop existing. Walls go. Movable boxes go. Lasers that kill on contact go. Bouncing blocks shift colour when you jump on them. Slime jets repaint other objects. Change the colour again and everything you erased snaps back.

The game uses that rule to build rooms that are really locks. Sometimes you need a key before the next room opens. Erlenmeyer flasks sit hidden in levels for players who want to comb every corner. Early puzzles hold your hand. Later ones stack colours and objects until the screen looks like a knot.

What Happens When You Touch a Spike

Death in Hue is cheap and quick. Touch a spike or a laser, take a hit from a falling object, or drop into the abyss, and the game sends you back to the start of the room. There is no health bar to manage and no long walk back.

That choice keeps the pace up. It also means a hard room becomes a loop of small failures, each one a few seconds long. The game is rarely cruel. It is often exacting.

Hue himself can walk, jump, climb ladders, and push or pull objects. That is a small move set, and it never grows. The colour wheel is the only thing that expands. By the end, the game leans on it completely.

A Grey World That Fills In

The greyscale world is the point, not a style choice. Hue starts in a place with no colour at all, and every shard he finds adds one more option to the wheel. Progress is visible on the screen. A room you crossed in grey becomes a room you can reshape.

The shards are also the story. Each one is a piece of Anne’s research, so collecting them is both a mechanic and a search for a missing parent. The game ties those two threads together without much dialogue.

That restraint works better than a heavier plot would. Hue does not explain the void, the assistant, or what an impossible colour means. It leaves those questions open. Some players will want answers. The game is not interested in giving them.

Where Hue Gets Hard

The difficulty curve is honest. More shards mean more colours, and more colours mean more ways a room can fold in on itself. Areas you could not reach early become open once you have the right shade. That is a real sense of return, and it is the best thing Hue does.

It is also where the game can stall. A puzzle that depends on matching one exact colour to one exact object can turn into trial and error. When a room has four colours and six movable pieces, the solution is sometimes found by cycling the wheel until something disappears.

Hue is at its sharpest when a room asks you to think about colour as space. It is weakest when it asks you to think about colour as a password. The gap between those two modes is the difference between a great room and a forgettable one.

How Hue Compares

That table is the case for Hue in one glance. The game gives you one verb and builds an entire language out of it. Most games in this lane give you five verbs and never teach you a sixth.

Our Verdict on Hue

Hue earns its score on the strength of that single idea. The colour wheel is not a gimmick bolted onto a platformer. It is the platformer. Every wall, laser, box and jet in the game exists to be erased or restored, and the game understands that rule well enough to keep finding new uses for it across eight colours.

The weak spots are real. The story stays thin, and the back half leans on colour-matching puzzles that can be solved by patience rather than thought. The move set never grows, so the variety has to come entirely from the rooms. When a room is good, that is enough. When it is not, there is nothing else to hold onto.

Still, Hue is a game that knows what it is. It runs on PlayStation 4, Linux, PC, Mac, PlayStation Vita, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, alongside the later releases on iOS and Android, and it holds up as a compact, confident puzzle game with one strong mechanic and no padding. The greyscale world, the eight shards, and the boy looking for Anne are all in service of the same clean idea, and the idea pays off.

Curve Digital · Fiddlesticks · Hue · indie game review · Nintendo Switch · puzzle platformer