Animal Hearts: A Card Quest

I'm not saying that [b]Animal Hearts: A Card Quest[/b] is shovelware or that Baxter Game Studios is sketchy, but… I tried to look up whether the art was AI-generated and instead found a trail of red flags. Thank you, Baxter, for providing a key in exchange for an honest review and "for supporting indie games." [h3]Prologue: Gameplay[/h3] The review key advertised a "heartwarming card-based adventure" with exploration and "meaningful choices." Here's the game in a nutshell: It's a dumbed-down mix of mahjong and Solitaire, entirely dependent on RNG and kindergarten-level math, and any whiff of challenge is stripped away by an over-eager hint system and additional card draws. One positive: the upgrade shop uses in-game currency only. [h3]Act I: Setup[/H3] I played ten levels, found it unbearably boring, and figured I'd knock it out of my backlog with a quick "might be good for kids" curator review. There's no genAI disclosure on the Steam page, and a mobile game artist once complained to me that clients want her work to look [i]more[/i] genAI, so I started poking around for a "Credits" section just to confirm a human artist. Instead, I found a fishy privacy policy and the dev…

Played for a bit now. Glad to find this type of game without ads and microtransactions. Shop just uses in-game coin & hope it remains that way. Like most solitaires it's not easy to win so there are varied buffs and bonus cards to help. Choosing best ones adds a fair bit of strategy. Anyway, try the demo if interested. Gets more challenging with progress of course.