A Hint of a Tint

In Brief

Chances are, you've overlooked this game. I can't blame you. The concept isn't immediately grabbing. The profile page isn't awash in lush custom art or flooded with rave reviews. In an environment saturated with titles like I Miss the Sunrise and Middens, it's easy for something like Hint of a Tint to get lost in the noise. Unfortunately, in dismissing it, you're doing yourself a disservice. Hint is deceptive. It disguises itself in the trappings of a roguelike, but it packs a hell of a plot. It swarms its environments full of enemies, but then makes them optional by tying leveling to collectibles. It trots out cute anime portraits for the reader to look at, and then undercuts them with a storyline that would make Studio Gainax proud. Hint isn't for everyone, but it's well worth a second look. There's more beneath its humble exterior than the Chocobo-Mystery-Dungeon-style pitch would have you believe.

In Depth

Hint of a Tint takes a while to get rolling. Its controls take some adjusting to, and its plot starts out slow. These are the obstacles that you must overcome in order to get at the delicious nougaty center of its plot.

You begin with a single character navigating a maze of comfortable living rooms. Their contents are not immediately revealed, thanks to a well-implemented fog of war, and they are littered with procedurally generated traps, items, and enemies. Oh, you think, taken in by the familiar trappings, it's a roguelike. Technically, you're correct, but Hint wastes no time in breaking from formula.

Unlike other roguelikes, leveling in Hint is practically optional. You navigate rooms mostly by avoiding monsters and scavenging items. The items are what allow you to grow, either by giving you temporary abilities, recovering health, or improving stats. Leveling in Hint is entirely tied to item collection, and as such you can go the entire game without engaging in combat any more than a few times.

Combat is also a shift away from traditional ram-into-the-enemy-until-they-keel-over style mechanics. You can simply smash your body into another sprite, but that way of handling things is costly, and will run you a stiff toll in healing fruits. Alternately, you can bribe enemies into becoming your friends, pepper them with thrown objects and status effects, or maneuver them into their enemies. Different factions in Hint are not above having a go at each other, something very in keeping with the flavor of the setting.

The plot of Hint is where it truly shines--but, like everything else about the game, it starts out a little drab. A young girl awakens in a mysterious other world full of unusual creatures. That's all you have to go on at first. A secondary plot begins not long after, showing two diligent soldiers attempting to recover a prize for their queen. In the demo, neither plot really intersects with the other, and the overall feeling is of a story that never particularly went anywhere. In the full game, however, these plots intertwine with five or six more parallel storylines to become a complex tapestry of desperation and loss, showing the player clearly the little immoralities of a world on the brink of apocalypse. Flowerthief does a wonderful job of making every character sympathetic, and of keeping the player from arriving at easy answers. Nonetheless, there is heroism. In fact, there's a lot of it. The little sections of roguelike gameplay sometimes feel like a speedbump in the way of the plot, which starts gaining momentum during the first twenty minutes of play. After that, it doesn't slow down--ever--and, by the time it slams into its gut-tightening finale, the player isn't urging it to hurry up. He's holding on for dear life.

There are a few rough spots in Hint's design. The gameplay of its roguelike sections isn't especially immersive when compared with a crunchier game like NetHack, and the gentle cartoon-y-ness of its sprites and settings doesn't always match its grim-but-hopeful tone. Players looking for an intense tactical challenge will be disappointed, as will anyone looking for a cute, frivolous story. However, anyone willing to scratch the surface of this overlooked gem will find a world full of compelling characters beneath, more than willing to pull them in.