TIN HEARTS

Thinking outside the toy box

We learn to play before we can walk in Tin Hearts. Staring down at a workbench, our task is to guide a string of marching windup soldiers from their box to a magic door. To make this happen, we need to alter the direction of their single-file striding, which involves the simplest of toys – a triangular block with a T-shaped hole bored through its centre. We rotate and slide it over a matching peg standing in the soldiers’ path. They bump off the 45-degree angle, diverting towards the exit.

Tin Hearts thus begins as a reworking of the classic Lemmings concept, but it doesn’t stay still for long. After a few levels, we do learn to walk, as we’re set free to wander around the attic room that houses the bench, fetching more blocks from faraway shelves to integrate into the latest puzzle. This is the first time that the parameters of Tin Hearts dilate just as they begin to feel familiar, but not the last. In many games, creative director Kostas Zarifis notes, “You play the first three or four hours and you feel like ‘OK, so this is going to be it’. That was something we wanted to address in this game.”