Game Review: I Love Hue

So I was lying on my bed waiting for Seb to fall asleep, and I started browsing the Play Store to see if I could find a nice, preferably free, game to try.  And I stumbled across this...  I Love Hue (PEGI-3).  This is a mobile game, then, and we've all played it on our increasingly ageing Samsung Galaxy S7's (Edge and Not Edge).  I should say it is also available on Apple devices, and it's free on both.  (You can get rid of the ads by purchasing a Prism pack, the cheapest of which is £1.79 on Android and £1.99 on Apple.)

I Love You, I mean, I Love Hue

I have admit I do like the punnishness of the name.  Hehe.

This isn't a new game (it came out in 2017).  There's an I Love Hue Too now (released Valentine's Day this year - good work there!), which I haven't tried, but it's hard to see how it could do much to improve on this initial version of the concept.

Anyway, on to the game.  I thought it looked like an interesting puzzle game, and indeed it is.  It certainly tests your ability to recognise different shades of colours.  It's hard to explain, other than to say you have to rearrange squares of colour so they run seamlessly from fixed squares of different colours/shades.  It's easier to show you than to explain in words.  

From left to right: gradually those colours fall into place!

In the picture above, the four corner squares are anchored in place (the ones with the dots), so you have to rearrange the colours between those fixed points.

It's so weird.  You start off and you see the colours and think "I have no idea where to start with this!", then you start shuffling them round, and you get to a point where it just clicks.  It all comes together.  And your brain goes "Yay!" with a happy feeling.  And the game generally calls you an iridescent moonbeam or something, for being brilliant.

It's relaxing, it's simple, but it takes some thought.  It's a real feel good game.  I was playing it without worrying about my 'score', but Dad was playing it trying to beat the world average.  So perhaps that made it less relaxing for him, introducing an element of competition.  He did say it 'got too hard', which probably means he was finding it hard to beat the other people, as opposed to not being able to complete levels...

Admittedly it's not a game you'd spend hours playing in one sitting, but it's good for those little gaps when you just want something nice and calm.  (And at the moment in the world, I bet lots of you would like a little bit of calm.)  

I've only done 44 levels, and there are apparently over 900 in total.  It's hard to envisage many people getting all 900 levels completed.  The game isn't exactly varied enough to warrant that.  It's a bit like Sudoku in that you could probably cycle through the same few puzzles and you'd never know.  Unless you have some kind of super brain.  Ultimate memory champion.

Definitely recommend this, then.  It lets you play through the first bunch of levels without ads, but after that it plays an ad after you've solved every puzzle.  The pace of the game means this isn't as annoying as it could be, but still, 30 seconds of random ad every time you complete a level is a bit annoying.  Almost makes me want to pay to get a Prism pack so I can get rid of them.  But, hmm, maybe not.

The Prism packs, incidentally, are needed if you play loads.  Every level costs Prisms to play, and you only get a certain amount of Prisms per day when you log into the game.  If you played it a lot, you would run out.  But I have not played it enough to run out.  Maybe I'm getting old, but after a couple of levels it seems a bit hard on the old peepers.  Poor eyes, having to do all that hard work differentiating between very subtle shades of the same colour...

I'm a bright shining rainbow!