I found myself having to walk Whit into obstacles just to find the correct path through certain locations. Navigating the environment proves irritatingly finicky as well all too often the route you need to take is unclear. All too often your view of Whit will be blocked by an unruly tree branch. Camera controls are awkward and clunky, rarely reacting to your inputs in the way you expect. You see, despite the fantastic story, there are numerous presentational obstacles that will hamper a player’s enjoyment of the game and make it difficult to engage with the characters and the world depicted.įirst off, the isometric viewpoint is a real chore. What went wrong? That would all be down to the presentation. So, if you’ve taken a glance at the score before beginning this review – it’s okay, I won’t tell anyone – you might be confused that a game receiving hundreds of words of glowing praise hasn’t walked away with a top score. Surely this is a clear sign of a narrative adventure game that delivers a story as compelling as that of any book, film, or graphic novel? The story of Where the Heart Leads is up there with the best of any creative media. What I can tell you is that during my playthrough there were numerous dramatic events that I felt supremely invested in and, on several occasions, utterly uncertain of what was the best course of action to take. I’ve no way to substantiate this claim but based on the volume and variety of choices the game threw at me it does seem entirely plausible. This is a sweeping and epic tale, one that keeps the player guessing until the very end, of which there are apparently thousands. Either way, by plunging down this hole – akin to Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole – Whit enters a strange world in which he can revisit his past and make choices that will change his life, for better or worse. To be fair, it was always going to go wrong, as a plan involving a bathtub and a winch is never going to be a winner. The story of Where the Heart Leads kicks off with family man Whit Anderson falling down a sinkhole in an effort to save his dog. Would I love it or hate it? Rather boringly, the answer is somewhere in between.
So, it was with some trepidation that I approached Armature Studio’s surreal narrative adventure ‘Where the Heart Leads’. Sometimes I find myself utterly caught up in a complex and well-paced story of a narrative adventure, whilst on other occasions I’m left cold by the lack of compelling gameplay.
I sit on the fence with the genre myself – not with shellfish, they always get a hard pass. Others end up with a nasty rash, enlarged tongue and a fear of prawns that will never leave them. Some people love the taste and texture of the succulent meat. Narrative adventure games are a bit like eating shellfish.
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