Review: Tin Hearts delivers charming, heartfelt puzzles like clockwork

videogameschronicle.com:

Back in 1995, British studio Clockwork Games was tasked with taking the hugely successful puzzle game Lemmings and turning it 3D.

Numerous other video game series were making the jump from pixels to polygons at the time, and while the likes of Mario, Sonic and Zelda managed it with aplomb, the addition of a third dimension didn’t work for every franchise.

3D Lemmings was a prime example of this – by enabling the Lemmings to turn corners and by introducing a (pretty poor) 3D camera, the game added unnecessary complexity to a series whose simplicity was pivotal to its success.

Put simply, there’s a reason why not many studios have attempted to make a 3D Lemmings-style puzzler in the nearly three decades since.

Enter Tin Hearts, then, which is just that – a game that’s clearly been designed with Psygnosis’ iconic Lemmings series in mind, but sets it in a three-dimensional environment. And, brilliantly, it’s absolutely cracked it.

Each of the game’s stages starts with a bunch of small tin soldiers climbing out of a magical box. The player’s job is to guide the line of soldiers to an exit door by moving certain objects.

At first the only objects you can move are coloured blocks, which can each only be placed in specific areas, meaning it’s practically impossible to fail.

As the stages progress, though, these training wheels are slowly removed and the game introduces each of its key mechanics one by one. The coloured blocks are replaced by more generic red ones which can be placed anywhere, hazards start to appear, and so on.

You also gain new abilities over time, the most important being the ability to fast forward, rewind and freeze time. The latter is particularly useful because while time is frozen the game draws out the path the