The story any player will get on their own adventure is likely still to be well worth its runtime. It is impressive for a small project like this. By the end of a single playthrough, players will only see a select few cutscenes out of the many possible, based on their choices through the game.
Still, with music that loops a bit too often in several long scenes and animations that come across as wooden at times, it's not always as immersive as one would want for a game so intimately portraying a single family's shared life together.īut this remains a story-first experience, and in that regard, it performs much better, albeit still imperfectly.
Where the heart leads read online Patch#
Thankfully, a pre-launch patch improved the text size and should now hopefully satisfy most or all players' accessibility needs. Players can zoom in and out of any scene to a certain extent, but sometimes even the closest view of a scene feels too far. Armature smartly allows for players to open an overlay and catch up with the last several minutes of dialogue as needed. Without voice acting, it's on you to keep up with the hundreds - if not thousands - of dialogue lines in the game. More so, it's like a novel in that players will be doing a ton of reading. Players will most often have a few things to do and they can generally do them in any order, eventually advancing the plot once all story beats have been performed. Where The Heart Leads is probably best considered a visual novel, despite the fact that the game allows players to move through its scenes - sometimes even sizeable hubs like towns - rather freely. Often the game calls back to them confidently in dialogue, as though Armature is certain its narrative navigational systems are properly calibrated. Players will push Whit down a new path with each choice made, and the game does surprisingly well in accounting for your past decisions. Where The Heart Leads plays off of familiar tropes but slowly unravels them and reshapes them across roughly 10 hours. He's even got a girl next door with whom he's falling in love. He's got a creative but troublemaking older brother. The premise was enough to pull me into Whit's story, but it's the impressive branching paths laid out before players, sometimes seen, other times unseen, that really kept me invested.Īs a young kid, Whit has parents who make him work when he wants to play. It's hard to find a point of reference in its own medium, but look elsewhere and you may agree this ambitious project is not unlike Linklater's Boyhood. In Where The Heart Leads, the team behind Batman Arkham Origins Blackgate and Re Core pivots to an entirely new direction, focusing on a boy named Whit and the life he leads through the decades.
Where The Heart Leads Review: A Life Well-Traveled
While the game leans heavily on writing that sometimes buckles beneath the weight, on the whole, this is a unique project that seeks to depict both a moment in the lives of everyday people and their entire lives together with all the natural ups and downs that accompany any of us. Where The Heart Leads is a good example, not just of this trend, but of executing it well. In turn, we've seen many games, over the past decade especially, that have swapped monsters for the mundane, traded heroes versus villains in favor of the middle class versus their mortgages.
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