Heartbound

[h1]Not Recommended, even after 8 years of "early access" (10+ years of actual development)[/h1] Fast forward more than a decade since Jason began working on this game, and you get 3 puzzles, 2 minigames, and one whole boss fight. That's it. That's the game. Chapter 3 has been "in progress" since 2020. At this rate Chapters 4 and 5 will be finished posthumously. [hr][/hr] [h2]The Game[/h2] The first build of this game dates back to October 7th, 2015. That's when Jason started working on it. Early access launch didn't even happen until 2018, meaning the game had already been cooking for [i]three years[/i] before the public even got a version to be disappointed by. So really we're not looking at 8 years of early access, we're looking at over a decade of total development on a game you can finish before your lunch break ends. The pixel art is genuinely nice, credit where it's due, at least the artist clearly did their job. That's about where the compliments end. The dev talks a huge game about scope, story, "multiple endings," monthly patches, the whole vision-guy schtick, but the output doesn't match the mouth. One of the main philosophies of this game is "Choices matter", which…

This game is 8 years old and is still in early access, the developer will likely not finish it any time soon. The developer, a man named Jason, is a narcissist and opposed the Stop Killing Games movement, which directly harms game preservation and consumer rights. (He also claimed this game is unpirateable... which its not, prior to buying this I actually did play the game unofficially and had gotten past the measures extremely easily) I ended up buying this game and pushing myself past the 2 hour mark out of common decency and giving the minimum amount of respect. While I wish I refunded the game. I forked over the cash out of principles. The programming of this game is amateur quality at best and horribly unoptimized at worst, the only reason this game runs well is because of the art style saving it by being low weight pixel art. Dialogue skipping isn't an option despite how much the characters yap and how slow the text displays.

There are better indie games at far better prices than this. Setting aside the drama around the Creator. It’s an undertale clone, and not a good one. Far too short and has been basically abandoned. Yes there are updates, but they are usually very small bug fixes and spread out over time after the software got marked as abandonware. Don’t waste your time or your money.

I cannot recommend this game in full, honestly. The positives I can quickly list off, as that the art assets are quite good and barring one small bug, the game is pretty clear of other bugs. Additionally I quite liked some of the music, even if some of it felt like ripoffs of Toby Fox's music. To address the biggest negative, it's the writing. I do not comprehend the decision to make the player care about the dog, when you only get to interact with them for 5 minutes, as well as get basically no backstory relating to said dog. I understand the player is not the protagonist, and that they are their own character, but you should at least make the player care somewhat equally. Speaking of the protagonist, he suffers a huge issue that encompasses a lot of the writing, where any interaction involving him and another character is like listening to 2 reddit moderators speak to eachother. It's not endearing, it's frankly pretty annoying, especially with how often he does an unamused expression with "..." in response to a LOT of the games attempts at humor. The writing actually got pretty interesting at Animus (the animal world, I presume), because it enabled you to be kind of an ass, p…

The plot is absolutely boilerplate at best. If you can't name the game this is ripping off, you deserve better in life. Don't let the game's trailer reality distortion vortex capture you too, save your money, there aren't any real updates coming to this. This is a hobby at best, and in my opinion a grift that I wish I'd seen through sooner. It has content and gameplay, but don't expect to be as drawn in as the description would have you believe.

First off, about the game itself; not too long after the release and outstanding success of Undertale, this game was announced, and it's a game solely designed to ride on the hype of Undertale or games like it. And yet it misses on basically everything that makes Undertale and games like it great. It's unfunny, the characters and the story are uninspiring, the gameplay is boring. And after the dev realized that it's never going to live up to the expectations or standards of it's contemporaries, he switched to sub farming on twitch while the development of the game continued on a snail's pace. But more about the dev himself; probably everybody and their dogs know by now that that guy is a huge egotistical and talentless döüché-nozzle when debacle after debacle starring him took place. The thing is; before professional code devs exposed his subpar coding in Heartbound, before he made a butt of himself and opposed the stop killing games movement in a very self-serving way, before he was revealed to have made his mods donate to him in order to boost his donation and sub train numbers, before he review bombed other games, basically before any of the stuff people already know happened; …