![]() ![]() ![]() At over 600,000 words, the game’s narrative scope surpasses J.R.R. “ Maybe ‘meant to be’ is just our way of coping with the space we can’t cross between what is and what might have been.” What’s meant to be is entirely up to you in a way that feels more true for Where the Heart Leads than many of its contemporaries. ![]() “If you made different choices, you’d be a different person now, and the person you are tends to feel like the person you were always meant to be,” Whit muses to himself at one point in his solitary climb to the surface. Dozens of branching paths mean that even choices that feel insignificant can result in new opportunities or unanticipated outcomes several chapters later. The game’s core mechanic is centered on choices-pivotal moments where Whit makes a call or doesn’t, that have echoing impacts on himself and his family, not just in the present moment but years into their futures. It’s a game about relationships and the unmistakable influence we have upon the people closest to us. Every other person appears as those same ghostly, iridescent forms, and Whit finds himself continually bumping into a strange man that no one else seems able to see. The player explores Whit’s memories, collecting objects and artifacts in a fashion reminiscent of predecessors like Gone Home or Kentucky Route Zero, and eventually discovers through reliving Whit’s life that even his present and future can be changed. Where the Heart Leads unfolds like a dream, leading the player through phases of Whit’s life, from a teenager on the cusp of adulthood to starting a family and ultimately figuring out the type of man he wants to be. Cave walls give way to the sunny fields of his family farm in 1978, and as Whit squeezes between two rocks and makes his way towards the light, he’s suddenly seventeen again… Iridescent, ghostly forms of people he’s known and loved spring up, triggering old memories. Whit comes across handwritten notes from his family and pages torn from his journal. Nestled among the stone and moss at the bottom of the pit are familiar objects and buildings. But the journey down is much simpler than the journey getting out.Īs Whit begins searching for a path back to the surface, things start getting weird. Jumping into action to save her, Whit climbs into a makeshift swing the family had built using a pulley and an old bathtub and lowers himself into the sinkhole after Casey. Stumbling bleary-eyed after his family, Whit arrives on the scene just in time to see the beloved family dog Casey stumble into the crumbling abyss. Among the crashing of lightning and falling stone, a furious storm rips open an enormous sinkhole right outside of the Andersons’ front door. In Armature Studio’s surreal narrative adventure game Where the Heart Leads, players are offered the rarest of gifts: the ability to walk alongside the experiences that have defined our lives and truly ask ourselves, “Would I have made a different choice?”Īt the game’s start, Whit Anderson’s life as he knows it ends with a bang. There is so much in life outside of our control, despite our most carefully laid plans. Some feel small, and some feel big, while the impact of others is impossible to predict until long after the choice has been made. ![]()
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