Game review: Where Is My Heart?
Where is My Heart? is an indie platform/puzzle hybrid by Copenhagen Game Collective with a non-violent story and a platform hopping game play style. The story is about a family of monsters who visit a forest to picnic and instead end up lost. The father monster complains of the present and the mother laments the past, while the child monster simply wants his family to stop fighting and figure out a way home.
As the game opens, the first levels are very simple, allowing the player to get familiar with using all three monsters and their unique abilities. But soon the levels chop the screen up into a confusing mess of randomly sized square tiles.
In their untransformed states all three monster have exactly the same moves, but stacking the monsters on special tiles makes the monster of the right color change and accesses their secondary talents. Baby Brown turns into a white stag who can double jump, while Mother Orange turns into some kind of winged angel who can hop out of one tile and land in another, which all get rotated 45 degrees depending on which shoulder button you press after jumping. Father Black accesses a special bat-vision to see ledges and platforms that the others can’t, nor can they land on. But he can land on them, and his family can jump on him to progress farther.
All of this sounds great, but the biggest problem is, the game’s not fun. It’s slow and dull, and the choice to cut up levels and scatter them all over the screen means you’ll die a lot without knowing why. It doesn’t help that a lot of jumps have to be done “just so” in order to avoid traps that you can’t see.
The monsters emote with only one sound effect each, and by level 15, I was turning down the volume to avoid gritting my teeth over hearing “OY!” every ten seconds from Baby Brown. The background sound effects were nice enough, but again, it’s all kind of repetitive and tedious, even in early levels.
If I were to make a comparable book, the sentences would all be out of order, and I would haughtily explain that it’s up to you to decide what the proper order is. I’ll bet you wouldn’t make two pages into that book before you went, “Fuck, you, biatch, I’m outtie.”
Well that was something close to my response after level 20, when I gave up because the game seemed to be flaunting how high-minded it was, and how stupid I was for not grasping the point. At the point where I gave up, I was supposed to turn Baby Brown into a stag, which turns his parents into a pair of floating sprites. The sprites can pass through walls, and my goal was a ledge on the other side of the wall. But the process of shifting from one form to another meant that every single time, the sprites transformed back into monsters far, far away from the place they’d just been, and plunged to their deaths through an open pit. And, to make this level even more “amusing,” the entrance is over an open pit of spikes, resulting in 5-6 deaths EACH for both Mom and Pop just to get them back onto the starting platform.
If at any point you’ve read this and thought “That sounds fun,” then you are a masochist. (Which is fine and all, I don’t judge nobody for their kinks.) And if you are, before buying this game, you might just ask someone to beat you up. Because that might actually be more fun than this game.
Overall, I got the impression that a joke was being had at my expense, and not one of the levels made me smile or think “Hey, this is neat.” The whole thing is about as pretentious as a project from a first-year art student, and while I normally love puzzle games, the choice to cut up the screen feels more like a cheap tactic to kill the player, and only the most patient gamers should try this hot mess.
The game is a PS Mini, so the price isn’t wallet straining. I think I’d be a lot more pissed if I had to pay more for this, but as I’m only out 4 bucks, I just deleted it and went back to playing Project Diva f and Jetpack Joyride until some new releases come out.
So I give Where Is My Heart? two stars and would only suggest it to puzzle fans who don’t mind being abused and ridiculed by their games. Because you will get the feeling that the developer is sniggering at you behind their hand and muttering, “Look, the stupid gamer is confused by our clever trap.” Or, at least that’s how I felt after dying 20-40 times on the same levels before stumbling over an answer that made me go “What? But that doesn’t make any sense!”
So, this could be proof that I’m just too low brow for high minded concepts. But I’m choosing to interpret this another way. The game is pretentious and cheap, kind of like that crucifix in piss art that stirred everyone up a few decades back. Is the game art? Yes, probably in a cartoony 8-bit kind of way. But as a puzzle game, it’s about as fun as oral surgery with a stone drunk surgeon.
