Tin Hearts

Genre: Puzzle

Players: 1

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Review:

Tin Hearts is a Puzzle game released in 2023 on PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Nintendo Switch. In this game, players take the role of the ghostly spirit of a toymaker “possessing” wooden blocks and other objects to manipulate them to create a path for a line of toy soldiers to get from a box to a small doorway.

The gameplay here definitely seems inspired by games like Lemmings and Krusty’s Fun House, but doing this in a fully 3D space quite literally adds a new dimension to the gameplay, and the game doesn’t just give you everything you can work with to solve this game’s puzzles, but instead has you exploring the 3D space to search for the tools you need.

Speaking of tools, in addition to guiding the toy soldiers to exits, you will also sometimes be guiding them to locked boxes that will add additional abilities to your repertoire like the ability to manipulate time or the ability to use additional kinds of blocks. Some of these unlocked abilities seem pretty rudimentary, but it’s still a way to keep things interesting as you progress.

Unfortunately, the way this game has players moving around and manipulating objects in a 3D space is cumbersome, clunky, and at times frustrating. What’s more, the game frequently slows things down with distractions and detours to highlight a specific part of the environment or something pertinent to the story, which can really much up the pacing.

Let’s talk about that story for a moment. Tin Hearts is really precious about the story, to the point where it comes off as pretentious. At its core, it’s about the toymaker’s relationship with his daughter, and given how dramatic the framing is you pretty quickly get a feel for the general direction this story is going to take. It’s a lot of melodrama for what is at its core a game about manipulating simple children’s toys to solve puzzles.

The 3D visuals are decent here, though you can absolutely see how this was massively compromised from other versions, with an overall low resolution and low resolution textures that make it hard to appreciate what the game presents as a sort of gentle beauty. At the very least the lovely instrumental soundtrack isn’t limited by the Nintendo Switch, even if it tonally doesn’t seem to fit the gameplay.

I know I can focus on the negative sometimes, so I want to make it clear that I do actually like Tin Hearts, and I do think it is a good game. Once it finally gets going the Puzzle gameplay is quite good, and despite my issues with tone I do think the soundtrack is excellent. But the control issues, pacing issues, and pretentious tone all detract from the experience. I think Puzzle fans should still give this a look, but it’s going to be better on other platforms and even then you should be prepared for this game’s inflated sense of self-importance. But if you don’t mind that, I think you’ll enjoy what’s here.

tl;dr – Tin Hearts is a Puzzle game that has players manipulating toy blocks to create a path for toy soldiers to reach an exit. Once the game gets going it has a great gameplay premise with some good puzzles, but the pacing and controls are pretty terrible, and the presentation is overly-pretentious and is clearly downgraded on Nintendo Switch. However, despite these issues I do still think the gameplay is strong enough to be worth a look as long as you’re prepared for these other issues.

Grade: B-

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