Where The Heart Leads: Review

At The Bottom

The main character named Whit, his wife and two children wake up at night and see a huge crack in the ground next to the house. The dog guarding the yard was unlucky to be right at the scene of the disaster – it got stuck somewhere below and cannot get out. Whit decides to save the dog and hastily builds a structure that looks like a faucet with a bathtub attached to it. It is possible to go down and help the dog, but not to return on its own. The bathtub falls down for a very long time, but the hero miraculously survives.

This is the only fantastic moment in the game, and it immediately becomes obvious that this is something of a metaphor – after getting out of the bathroom, the character begins to walk through memories. First – from childhood Why is Max mute in Max and Ruby?, when he had to choose between helping his father and playing with his brother, then – from adolescence, youth, and so on. Everything is as down to earth and realistic as possible – no superpowers and salvation of the world, ordinary everyday life.

And this everyday life, it must be admitted, is capable of captivating. You get attached to the characters very quickly, and later, when you spent more than one or even five hours with them, they already become like family. We get to know all the characters on the farm: we help our father complete the construction, try to reason with our brother, spend time with our future wife, get to know her mother better. We do not go beyond the limits of a small area, but this is not necessary – the developers fit a lot of stories into the location, and after the farm the structure will be the same, only in different decorations.

Where the Heart Leads is a game filled with dialogue. Try talking to someone and get ready to read a lot. Not a single line is voiced, the characters are impersonal mannequins and are not animated in any way. Their movements are fragmentary, like in real memories. Of course, it’s hard to perceive all this for more than 12 hours – there are drawn-out moments and unnecessary dialogues, sometimes you forget where you go, and you talk to everyone blindly.

But the choice of answers in the dialogues leads to interesting consequences for which you continue to play. Some will show themselves right away, for the sake of some you will have to wait for the next chapter or the final hours. There are a lot of such situations, and it is often very difficult to make a choice. The girl spends less and less time with the musical group and is engaged in art – to dissuade her or let her do what she wants? The brother needs work, but the wife, tired of sitting with the children, also wants to take a break from them in the office – who to give preference if there is only one vacancy?

There are no unexpected turns in the game, but there are enough cute scenes in which we are directly involved. Here my future wife and I are lying on the ground and wondering what the clouds floating across the sky are like. But with my brother we decorate the town for Christmas and decide whether to do everything according to the classics or let a relative do something like that. But we are looking for a new room for him – cheap, with dead rats, or expensive, but in the latter case we have to help him with payment. When you begin to see the first consequences of your actions, the choice becomes more difficult.

Errors Of Youth

It’s good that Where the Heart Leads has such variability, because without it the game would not be of interest. Gameplay like Best Grenade spots dust 2 is a standard walking simulator, only with a top view – the camera slowly turns and in a couple of moments shows what is happening at not the most successful angles. There are collectible items that better reveal the relationship between the characters, but here there is already an overabundance of information – opponents of the notes will be glad that everything is more than clear without them.

When the dialogue is dragged out again or a piece that is not very necessary for the plot begins, it becomes very insulting that the developers could not stop in time – they wrote and wrote, supplemented and supplemented. In the middle of the game, you spend about half an hour on conversations, in which you don’t even need to make a choice. Immediately you begin to think that the idea of impersonal people is not the best, and the camera should not have been so far away, and the lack of voice acting is annoying. Even if the English language is simple, it will be difficult for those who are not used to such volumes of text.

At some point, you are put in a difficult situation, you make a difficult decision and the game accelerates again. These episodes are the best in Where the Heart Leads , what the game was made for. And you start to like everything again: mournful melodies on the piano, watercolor visual style, even dialogues you want to read, no matter how many of them there are. And after a few minutes or hours, you see quite logical consequences of your decisions – you expected some, feared some. Ultimately, our decisions lead to one of a dozen endings.

Conclusion:

There are no mini-games (do not count the moments when you are asked to hold down the “Log Horizon season 3“), no puzzles either. Local jigsaw puzzles are more of a piece of history with obvious clues. In one of the episodes, you need to find the key to the safe, but the hero does not know exactly where it lies; the game suggests all ten places where it could have been put, and we just need to check everything. This episode at the gas station is generally one of the most interesting, because we meet several customers there with different requests and choose how to react to them. But if you made other decisions before it, you can completely skip it and be at that moment on the other end of the map.