You'll spend your time playing Where the Heart Leads traversing these vignettes, interacting with people Whit knows, trying to make ends meet, and solving familial drama. Here Whit travels to a surreal world in which he can see his entire life unfold, and in which seemingly minor decisions can have major repercussions decades later. His trusty pooch goes to investigate, but falls down the hole because it's a moron, and so Whit does the sensible thing and climbs down into the unknown to save his pea-brain dog. The game begins with our champion, Whit, waking in the night to discover that a gigantic sink-hole has opened up outside his farm. Where the Heart Leads is a video game about life which successfully recreates the tedium of being alive, but only takes the best part of twenty hours to finish rather than seventy-odd years. While it might not be for everyone, those who discover it will likely find themselves better for the experience.Life can be pretty tedious, which is why we invented video games. You'll get lost in a beautiful world full of relatable characters and complex relationships, and there just isn't anything quite like Where the Heart Leads out there right now. Those nitpicks, and they are nitpicks, likely won't really bother too many players as the story of Whit and Rene is captivating enough to push through any issues. Because things are a little far off, it can make some sections of the game a little difficult to navigate, especially in darker or snow-covered environments. Also even when completely zoomed in, the character models are quite small, and the dialogue font isn't that large either, which was a little frustrating, as that frequent squinting can take you out of things a bit. You can't just rotate the camera completely to get a better view of where you need to head to next (which is often marked with silhouettes of the characters you are trying to talk to), and at times it can be a little difficult to figure out where a certain character went without just walking around aimlessly a bit until you see one of these silhouettes. The world is lush and fun to explore, and the camera seems to be created to further push you to explore it, as it lets you zoom in and out and pan but only to a certain point. Granted, not everything is perfect, though the biggest issues seem more like a purposeful choice that I just don't love rather than any sort of glitch or major flaw. It's a truly unique aesthetic that sets the game apart from anything else, and it's a style I grew to love. When you head into a building the game pulls the front layer of the area away so you can see the architecture and your characters inside, and the characters themselves are semi-translucent figures other than Whit. That said, its presentation is far from straightforward, with an almost watercolor style effect applied to the game's environments that still gets across the various little details of the various locations in the cities and surrounding land. Where the Heart Leads does have a few game-centric mechanics that you will interact with along the journey, but most of the game is solely focused on dialogue. That's also why it feels so real, even in the most mundane conversations, and despite the surreal circumstances that lead to this story, there were many immensely relatable instances throughout Whit's journey that hit close to home. There is one early on where you can reveal two huge secrets to your mother, and while it felt like the right thing to do (I even got a Trophy for it), I was surprised to see that it might not have been the most outright beneficial to the family's current predicament, even if it was probably better for the family's cohesion as a whole. As in most games of this ilk, some choices don't really affect the broader story while others change it significantly, but on the whole, it was quite impressive how many choices really mattered and set things on a different path. Again, the star of the show here is the actual story of this family and how your decisions can affect the direction of not only your life but those around you for years to come, and there were many moments where I wanted to immediately go back and see how a change in the decision would change the outcome for my family and friends.
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