Where is My Heart? Review

     It seems to me like I've been playing a lot of games in the puzzle platformer genre lately, or at least plenty of games in the “get from point A to point B” school of puzzling thought. I reviewed Quantum Conundrum last week, and the Unfinished Swan and Closure are coming up next. This week is Where is My Heart? You already know what I gave Quantum Conundrum (great game tier 3). While all of these games are great, two of the three others are going to get perfect or near perfect scores. Obviously, you'll know by process of elimination by the end of this review, but do you care to take a guess before you get to the end?

     Where is My Heart is a Playstation Mini, playable on PSP, PS3, and PSVita. It's a 2d puzzle platformer done in a wonderfully serene and beautiful 8-bit style. I think it's the color palette that really makes it stand out. There are lot of purples and yellows that are not quite pastel and a lot of browns and grays that almost are. You play as three monsters, a family consisting of mom, dad, and their young child. They are searching for a special tree that has flown away, and seem to be getting lost as they go. Each of the three are really beautiful sprites with great animation.

     In each level, you control all three monsters, and you must get them all to the exit in order to move on. You move with the d-pad, switch which monster you are controlling with triangle or circle, and jump with cross. Puzzles often involve stacking the monsters on each others' heads to reach certain areas, basic platforming, and getting to certain blocks that you can activate to have hearts fly out and fill in silhouetted blocks or clear out blocked off areas, allowing you to proceed. There are also some advanced things you'll be doing, which I'll talk about in a sec, but first we need to talk about what really sets this game apart.

     The game's gimmick (and I use that word without any negative connotation) is that each level is chopped into frames, and frames that are adjacent to one another do not necessarily depict areas that are adjacent or even near each other in reality. Adjacent frames are not necessarily even at the same zoom level. The frames themselves are often times not the same size. Some are large, some are tiny. It's as if the real level is in there somewhere, and there are several cameras on it. Some are at different zoom levels, and some are displayed on smaller or larger monitors. And the monitors are scrambled. It's hard to describe. An example would be a level that is just a straight walk from the entrance to the exit. There are four frames. When you walk forward, you will go through frame 1, then appear in frame 3, then 2, then 4. In other levels, these frames might be on top of each other, or across the screen from each other, and the level might have a lot of verticality (even though you might pop out in a frame at the bottom of the screen after you jump up a bunch of platforms). Once you understand the idea, it's quite an ingenious thing. You might think it's something that you'll be able to play right through, like your gamer brain can unscramble the images and allow you to play normally. You'll quickly see that isn't true, it's going to confound and surprise you the whole way through.

     This amazing concept is executed brilliantly throughout the game in many ways. There are frames that show the same thing, but in different sizes. You might walk out of a frame and into one that shows your character at a bigger size (you can really see the pixelated details of the sprites in these shots). Frames might also show the same thing in the same size. So if you move too quickly, that platform you think you need to jump to in the next frame might actually be the platform you are already on. You might jump forward only to land in a frame behind where you started. Some parts of the level seem to not appear in any frame. Some levels feature teleporting blocks or big leaps that take you to seemingly distant areas, until you discover that you are really right next to where you were and that there is a barrier between the two areas that is only seen in some tiny frame in the corner of the screen. Each level has the frames laid out in different ways and shapes as well. As a way of making you feel lost (as your characters are) this is ingenious. As a gameplay mechanic, this is also ingenious. You may think you understand how it works, but you need to experience it firsthand to understand what it feels like to play this game. And since there are so many implementations and variations of this idea in the game's levels, it's never going to wear out its welcome. It only gets more compelling as you go on.

     Each character can transform to an alternate form by finding certain blocks and standing all the monsters on the blocks on each others' heads in a certain order, which is dictated by colored silhouettes that appear over the blocks. Two of the monsters gain some cool abilities that could be featured in a normal platformer. I'll let you see for yourself what they are. Those abilities are great, but the one that interacts with the whole frame concept is the orange monster's alternate form, the Rainbow Spirit. While controlling the Rainbow Spirit, you can press L or R to rotate the frames. This, of course, does not change the layout of the reality of the level, only your perspective on the level. Simply rotating the screen may reveal frames that were partially offscreen, but is generally just a viewpoint change. The real magic is pressing L or R while jumping. This makes the Rainbow Spirit stay in place on the screen as the frames rotate around her. Meaning when you stop rotating, she will land in whatever frame is under her (unless she lands inside a solid object or outside of all the frames, which will kill her).

     This ability is a whole nother brain bending idea built on top of the first. To get somewhere in this form, you have to go to a place in the areas you can go to that will line up with the spot you want to get to in another frame when it comes around. I'll just stop explaining it now, because once again, even a video wouldn't do this concept justice, you have to actually experience it yourself. And once again, it is brilliantly executed.

     The levels are all very short, but have just the right amount of difficulty. Just like I said in the Quantum Conundrum review, you're never stuck for long enough to get frustrated, but you never get unstuck early enough that you are bored or just blazing through. The pacing is pretty much perfect.

     There is the additional gameplay element of scoring. Each level has a certain amount of hearts in it that you can collect. This is totally optional, as you only need to get to the exit to continue. Getting a heart increases your score for the level by 1. If you die (by falling off a cliff, or hitting spikes), the character you were playing respawns at the beginning of the level, but first their skeleton sprite produces a dark heart, which lowers your level score by 1. At the end of the level, the level score (rounded up to 0 if you were in the negative) gets added to your total, which is tracked on the pause menu. A lot of these hearts are in out of the way spots, and collecting all of them without dying is a challenge. Once I beat the game, I immediately played it again in the quest to get a perfect score. I had a blast going to every corner of every stage to collect hearts and forcing myself to start each level over if I had any deaths, and I highly recommend trying for a perfect score. The game is quite short (which I'm not saying is bad. In this case, the length is perfect), so playing again is totally feasible and just as much fun as the first time. Did I succeed in getting a perfect score though? That's where my one and only complaint about this game comes in. It is glitched so that you can only get a score of 171 out of 172 hearts. The designer, @bushghost, confirmed to me on twitter that one of the hearts is unreachable due to a design flaw or glitch (apparently it's off screen too, as I never even saw it). This may seem like a superficial flaw, but I was surprised at how much it affected my sense of satisfaction and completeness at the end of my perfect run. Not getting to see my long sought after 172 of 172 was very disappointing.

     But like I said, that is literally this game's only flaw. The game's subtle music and ambient nature sounds lend themselves perfectly to the pace of the puzzling and exploring. The games theme of being lost, emotional distress and depression, family, and nature are subtly shown to the player in the short screens that tell you the name of the level when you get to a new one. One of the characters is on this screen each time along with a quote from them. It's less about what is happening in a story (although there are a few events in the story, and those are great) and more about a mood that you get from these on-screen quotes, the graphical style, and the sounds of the game. It's hard to put into words what this mood is, but it's something we've all felt and everyone whose paying attention will recognize.

     To me, that one flaw in the scoring system is kind of a big deal. That's my personal feeling. If that doesn't bother you, then this is a close-to-perfect game. I would give it a perfect score if the scoring system was patched or if a new version comes out with this problem fixed. As is, I have to dock it ever so slightly and give it a score of great game, tier 2. It's really a tier 1 game though if a tiny fix was implemented, which means, in my opinion, it is approaching gaming perfection.