Kevin C. Wong

Apple Arcade - Discolored (2019) [+]

Discolored is short first-person puzzle game set a lonely empty diner. At first everything is grey-scale. But as you find three crystals (green, blue, red) and emplace them anything that has that color is painted with the color.

What this does is reveal things that were solely that color or reveal parts of things hidden because that color was not enabled. And later on you sometimes have to disable a color in order to make an obstacle disappear. You also have these stereoscopic ViewMaster like glasses. Sometimes you find an insert and that allows you to see a hidden object.

The graphics are fairly basic. The background sounds and occasional spooky music plays.

The puzzles are not too hard and very linear in that you specifically have to do A before you can do B -- you don't have several puzzles that can be done intermingled but that all must be done to proceed. In terms of inventory, when you're done with an item it disappears so you know you're done with it (a very few items are used more than once each).

Because of the linear puzzles the hint system is quite nice. Any time you're stuck you can go to Settings -> Hints and get a hint on what to do next. It might be something like "why not take a look at the well again" or "you can combine parts in your inventory".

It's an easy-going puzzle game that took me two or three hours to play. Maybe five hours if I had not used any clues (I think I used the hints four or five times). Definitely feels like chapter 1 of a story but there was never any follow up in this game. Instead I see there is a Discolored 2 in development on Steam.