What it is

Hue Cue is a digital take on the Stroop test from 1935, sized down to one short question per round: does the word match the colour it's written in? The word "BLUE" written in blue ink is a Yes. The word "BLUE" written in red ink is a No. Most rounds are a No. You have three seconds at the start. Every three correct answers, the clock shrinks by 100 milliseconds.

How to play

The word in the middle of the playfield is a colour name.
The colour the word is painted in might be the same colour, or a different colour.
Press → (or "Yes") if they match.
Press ← (or "No") if they don't.
Three lives. A miss is a wrong press or a timeout. Lose all three and the run ends.
Each three correct shaves 100 ms off the clock, to a floor of one second.

The trick

Your reading brain is faster than your colour-naming brain. That's the whole point of Stroop. The trick is to look at the colour first and read the word second — but the eye doesn't naturally do that. Some players find it easier to squint slightly so the word blurs and only the colour comes through. Others find it easier to read the word out loud (literally, in their head) and then check. Both work. Most people plateau around score 25; getting to 40+ means you've stopped reading the word as a word.

What this scored well on

It teaches something. Hue Cue is one of two games in this batch that has an actual psychological correlate. Three minutes of practice will measurably improve your reaction-time profile on similar tasks for the next half hour.
The pace. Three seconds is exactly the right starting clock. Shorter feels punishing; longer feels boring.
Honest failure. No ambiguous frames, no double-press protection eating your input. You pressed, we read it.

What it gets wrong

Colour-blind players will have a rough time, especially red-green colour-blind players. We added a higher-contrast palette later in development to help, but it remains true that this game asks you to distinguish four colours by sight alone. If you have any form of colour vision deficiency, try it once, see whether you can tell the four palette colours apart at full size, and decide from there. We'd rather you skip the game than struggle through it.

Who it's for

Hue Cue is for people who liked Lumosity for a week and then quit because the meta-game got tedious. It's a small, sharp version of the kind of cognitive exercise those apps wrap in fifty layers of meta-progression. Three minutes a day, no upsell, no streak shaming.

Where we'd point you next

If you liked Hue Cue's reaction-and-decide rhythm, try Pulse Lock (#01 — the one-button timing game). If you liked the cognitive flavour, watch for Number Rush (#05 — sequential 1-to-20 speed-tap) shipping in this batch.

Released · 12 May 2026 · Editor's score 4.6 / 5 · Reviewed by Bill