Tin Hearts takes you into the life of an inventor in a magical, puzzle-solving Victorian-time tale.
As they say, every invention has a story; you’ll learn more about that as we enter this fine festive period. Tin Hearts can serve as one of the Christmas treats for your children or even yourselves as an adult. Why, do you ask? If you’re looking for a refined, enjoyable experience and genuinely enjoy doing puzzles with your family or yourself, please look no further.
Tin Hearts will give you all of that, plus much more. You want to know what’s even better? If you’re an Xbox Game Pass member, all you have to do is simply install it, and you’re good to go. But what makes Tin Heart such a play title? Well, for starters, believe it or not, Tim Hearts is much more of a puzzle solver. It also involves a deep, immersive, and emotional storyline that you cannot miss out on.
Given to us by the makers of positively reviewed Fable. Set in Victorian times, enter a touching tale of genius inventor Albert J. Butterworth. The story is beautifully told with a series of photographs, handwritten letters, memories, and more to grasp your interest from start to finish. Whether in the luxurious garden or simply in Albert’s basement, you’ll enjoy exploring his rollercoaster life and understand the importance of family, love, and more. Furthermore, you’re guaranteed the ample gameplay length that follows.
Your job in Tin Hearts is to guide an army of tin soldiers and help them achieve their objectives in a magically filled world, especially when you’re dealing with Mr. Soldier, a completely controllable toy with an exceptional ability that includes conjuring the best ways to progress. Pretty simple, right? Well, not so much when there are a whopping 50+ puzzles with impressive puzzle mechanics and designs for you to solve.
You get to enjoy an abundance of lemmings-styled puzzles that are fun and brain-challenging. Tim Heart’s main aim of the game is that each level requires you to use a set of inventions at your disposal, deploy them correctly, and create some sort of pathways to successfully take your toy soldiers to the finish line.
One of the types of puzzles in Tin Hearts you’ll face involves toy soldiers that are usually placed inside a toy box, and you can open it at any time during a level. But preferably, it’s best to open it before or even while you’re creating pathways for them. You’re required to guide these soldiers to the exit and make sure you meet the required number of soldiers that must enter the said exit.
Don’t worry; one thing you’ll be pleased about is that there are no time limits involved, so you and your group can take as much time as needed to finish the puzzles and move on to the next one. However, time is still involved in Tin Hearts, and I’ll explain why soon.
For example, an exit door would have the sign 0/3 on it. That means you have to successfully create pathways to guide a maximum of three toy soldiers through the exit door to advance to the next level. But firstly, you’ll have to guide one soldier to a toy house that might contain a collectible and unlocks more toys for you be able to complete a puzzle. Again, this is just a snippet of what you’ll come across.
At first, the mechanics are pretty simple. But as you progress, they take things to the next level by switching it up with more obstacles, and you’re placed in larger environments. Plus, you’ll also need to adjust other toys, such as trampoline drums, canons, inflating balloons, plus more to guide your soldiers. It gets tougher on some levels, while others are straightforward. But the most difficult challenge is a revolutionary invention that lies ahead.
Having said all of that, you can get away with doing the earlier puzzles, but as you advance through the story, you probably should team up with other people as it’s much better to work as a group than go solo to finish some of the latter puzzles faster. I won’t lie to you; you’ll most likely be taking on puzzles that may have you wanting to pull your hair out, even if you’re playing as a team. But still completing them becomes much more rewarding.
You can perform actions such as ascending and descending the toys. As well as rotate them vertically or horizontally, hold them in place, and of course, confirm the position where you want a toy to be. In case you were wondering, you can definitely toggle the camera to many different angles to help you observe the puzzle you’re currently solving, get a better view of your soldiers, and sometimes avoid making a mistake.
Remember when I mentioned about time? Pay attention. Now, pay attention; another one of Tin Hearts’ mechanics that you’ll definitely love is the ability to control time. No, seriously, you’ll be able to rewind, fast forward, and pause time during levels to aid you in successfully solving puzzles by analysing situations and altering the outcome of your actions.
Let’s say that you’ve broken Mr Soldier because of a terrible mistake. Rewind time, and you can pretend it never happened. I particularly fancy this mechanic because you can’t also slow down time, or speed up the process, especially when the toys are travelling on large surfaces, and it saves a lot of time.
It’s worth mentioning the blending between cartoonish and somewhat photorealistic and incredibly color-laden designs of the toys, items, and so much more, as well as the magical and eye-gazing animations to make you grin from ear to ear and having you wish that this was happening within your proximity in real life. When you look at these, they make you truly appreciate how attractive the art and designs of the Victorian times were. In a way, Tin Heart gives me glimpses of movies from the Toy Story franchise where you have toys that are alive and moving.
Tin Hearts’ harmonizing music also deserves much love as they are nice to listen to and provide relaxing sensations at times to help calm you down a little, even when you’re currently entangled in frustrating puzzles. You can thank the award-winning composer and producer Matthew Chastney. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, he helped work on trailers for blockbuster projects such as Venom: Let There Be Karnage, Joker, and Bridgerton.
The magical and emotional story, along with the puzzles and the Christmas-themed designs, is something that any child will love. But as an adult, Tin Hearts can definitely make you feel like a kid again. But I’m not so keen on that. It looks like once you’ve started the story, you cannot start over the game until you’ve finished the entire campaign. This isn’t necessarily a problem worth stressing, but for a few reasons, you might want to start from the beginning, regardless of how far you progress.
This cannot be emphasized enough, but Tin Hearts is a heartwarming, family-gathering title that’ll bring joy and smiles this time of the year. Plus, there is an array of engaging, immersive, and challenging puzzles to solve. On top of that, it’s available on Xbox Game Pass; what’s not to love? So, we’ll take that as a great Christmas gift; thank you very much.
