Tin Hearts Review (gussmed)
After a delay of a couple of months, they fixed the bug in level 50, and it's possible to finish the game again.
Tin Hearts is a puzzle game along the line of Lemmings. In each level, you guide a line of marching toy soldiers to the exit. You have to move various parts such as blocks and drums (which act as trampolines) around until they can reach their destination.
There's also some light platforming. About midway through the game you gain the ability to possess one of the soldiers and control it directly. In puzzles where this is an option, you need to send this scout ahead to perform various actions that the regular soldiers won't do on their own. Usually this involves a bit of jumping and following paths that the regular soldiers won't.
Each level is a Rube Goldberg machine, often with a number of ridiculous things happening. The early levels are very simple. For example, the blocks in the first few puzzles can only be placed on specific locations, which is very restrictive and makes the puzzles trivial.
After a bit of that, though, you get blocks that can be placed pretty much anywhere, and that's the least of the things you end up doing. Eventually the game takes a decidedly steampunk bent, with all sorts of fantastic steam-powered machines and pneumatic tube systems to send the soldiers around the increasingly large and more complex puzzles.
One of the abilities you get early is the ability to pause time or rewind it, which is essential to finishing the game since otherwise there's a lot of time sensitive actions. Usually you have a limited number of pieces, and you have to re-use pieces from earlier in the puzzle.
Eventually the puzzles get difficult enough that most of them have some sort of "aha" moment where you find a way past something that initially looks impossible. The game has a hint system, but it foolishly penalizes you by forbidding achievements if you use it too much. It's like the designers *want* the player to look up YouTube videoes instead of staying in the game.
It's really amazing looking in VR. The environments are complex and the art very well done with few exceptions. The soldiers in particular are really fantastic, with elaborate animations for everything they do, from climbing to jumping to riding balloons. The only weak point in the art is the humans, who look cartoonish at best, and sometimes downright creepy because of the eyes.
Which brings me to the only part I didn't like about the game. The story. It's a rather banal, uninteresting story of pointless tragedy, and the cutscenes detailing this sometimes go on far, far too long. Particularly the epilogue after you finish the last, 3-part puzzle.
Regardless, it's still an excellent game, particularly if you have a VR headset. I played using Index controllers, and I gather it works well enough with Quest controllers, but I don't know how well it plays with Vive wands. It felt like the joysticks were really essential.