Tried though I did back in the 90s, I could never get to grips with Lemmings. Perhaps it’s because I was too young, and the sheer stress of watching a line of dopey green-haired idiots marching in their night-gowns to what was always an inevitable death was just too much for my young mind to bear; or perhaps it’s because by the time I ever thought to pause in that game I had already irreversibly screwed up. Whatever the case, given that the amount of Lemming lives lost at my fumbling fingertips amounts to something of a mass extinction event, I prefer not to look back.
So instead of looking back to the traumas of the past, I instead lookforward– forward toTin Hearts, a beautiful, twinkly Lemmings-like from developer Rogue Sun, a studio made up of Lionhead Studios (of Fable fame) alumni.
I say ‘Lemmings-like,’ because that’s the easiest reference point for a game where a steady succession of little wind-up toy soldiers jump out of a box and walk in a straight line until you redirect them. However, during my two-hour hands-on I also experienced the game as an Edith Finch-like first-person exploration game, as well as a 3D platformer, where you may break one of the soldiers away from the marching line, then run and jump around freely to sort out the path forward for your little mechanical brothers-in-arms. It’s wonderfully inventive.
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But at its tinny yet big heart, this game is about guiding your little platoon of toy soldiers from A to B. I played several levels of the game, set across various worktops, dining tables, and other solid wooden furnishings (none of that IKEA nonsense) of a vast Victorian house.
The game impressed me in how steadily it took the training wheels off. In the first mission, each block I used to redirect the soldiers went in a specific marked-out place and slots onto a specific peg. Just as I start wondering whether this is some kind of ‘Lemmings for Toddlers’ game, Tin Hearts takes those wheels off, giving you complete freedom about where you plonk down your blocks, before adding new elements into the mix like cannons, blow-up balloons, and eventually the natural forces of steam and electricity.
The fact that the game’s completely 3D adds its own kind of visual complexity. I had a few issues with rotating the blocks correctly, as well as aiming the cannons in first-person, and I definitely felt how this was originally designed as a VR game (now, the VR mode is to be included in a post-launch update).
But for the most part, any kind of block-placement clunkiness, as well as that horrid sense of panic that Lemmings always brought up in me, is offset by a couple of excellent design choices. First off, you can freely rewind and fast-forward the game at any point. I think there may even be an in-world explanation for your ability to manipulate time, but whatever the case, itreallyeases up the pace knowing that each soldier’s death is reversible, which in turn lets you bask in how lovely it all is.
Seriously, zooming in on those cheery rosey-cheeked little soldiers with their gleaming brassy back-keys, and listening to the soundtrack as well as the gentleplinking as they march towards whatever fate I laid out for them, put me into an almost ASMR-like trance. And sure, my state of bliss meant that a fair number (ok,a lot) of soldiers walked off of tables and shattered into a shower of cogs and little metal bits, but that was fine, because I could just rewind back to the critical point where things went awry.
This means that even though the puzzles get pretty challenging pretty quickly, the focus is on racking your brains to solve them rather than rushing to plot the path ahead before time runs out. The rewind feature may just be one mechanic, but it marks a significant departure from what I always remember as being quite a relentless pace to Lemmings.
From what I’ve played, the soldiers don’t have a range of abilities they can use like Lemmings, but instead you manipulate the environment around you. A big part of this is by using the ‘breakaway’ soldier, who you can use to run around the level 3D platformer-style, pushing over ladders to make bridges, firing cannons, and flying over gaps by hanging off the bottom of blow-up balloons. In the final level I played, the game geared towards an engineering focus, as you manipulate energies like steam and electricity in a very steampunky basement level.
you may pause the game too, and when you do you see a spectral line that shows you the exact path your soldiers will take, letting you plan ahead before your soldiers get there. It’s another clever feature that all but eradicates the stress element from the game, and also offers a bit of a visual aid in a game where, by its 3D nature, it’s not always easy to see where your soldiers will end up.
There are plenty of lovely layers here, and the studio’s storytelling chops shine through between missions in little spectral vignettes of the family life of the eccentric Victorian inventor you play as in the game. I don’t know if the ghostly figures are actual ghosts, or more like representations of memories, but the devs assure me that there’s a whole lot more going on here than just toy soldiers marching from one place to another (charming though they are).
Tin Hearts is set to come out August 04, 2025, and if you’re a fan of cerebral yet slow-paced puzzle games with some narrative swag from a studio that knows a thing or two about storytelling, this could be one to keep an eye on.
