Herald: The Interactive Period Drama – Complete Edition
Wispfire · 2025 · Adventure, Point & Click, Interactive Fiction, Visual Novel, Choose Your Own Adventure
PC
Positive82% · 2277Metacritic
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About Herald: The Interactive Period Drama – Complete Edition
Herald is a choice-driven adventure game set during an alternate 19th century in which the West is united as a colonial superpower: the Protectorate.
Help tell the story of Devan Rensburg, a man of mixed heritage who became steward on board of the HLV Herald, a merchant ship set for his country of birth. As Devan it is your job to keep the peace among the crew and passengers by resolving their daily squabbles. Set during a time of widespread inequality and injustice, you are challenged to uncover a great mystery that surrounds the Herald's perilous voyage. The 'Complete Edition' contains all four books that tell the entire story of the Herald. The free-to-play demo lets you play the first of four books of the game for free. After finishing the demo, you can continue to use your save in the full game.Owners of 'Book I & II' can opt for the 'Complete Edition Bundle' to get a 40% discount on the upgrade to Complete Edition.
Help tell the story of Devan Rensburg, a man of mixed heritage who became steward on board of the HLV Herald, a merchant ship set for his country of birth. As Devan it is your job to keep the peace among the crew and passengers by resolving their daily squabbles. Set during a time of widespread inequality and injustice, you are challenged to uncover a great mystery that surrounds the Herald's perilous voyage. The 'Complete Edition' contains all four books that tell the entire story of the Herald. The free-to-play demo lets you play the first of four books of the game for free. After finishing the demo, you can continue to use your save in the full game.Owners of 'Book I & II' can opt for the 'Complete Edition Bundle' to get a 40% discount on the upgrade to Complete Edition.
Key Features
- A branching narrative that changes depending on how you decide to play. Do you choose to be bold and stand up for the downtrodden, or would pleasing the elite be the safer and smarter choice?
- Uncover all of the secrets aboard the merchant clipper Herald, as you explore its many nooks and crannies.
- The Herald is a microcosm of 19th century society. The crew and passengers all have their own dark secrets and often use sly coercion to convince Devan to help them. But who can you trust?
- Herald's diverse cast of characters is brought to life by beautifully animated portraits, and the performances of eighteen talented voice actors.
- Herald is set during an alternate 1857 in which the West has been united as a single global superpower: the Protectorate. Governed not by kings but by an elected 'Lord Protector’, the Protectorians believe they are morally superior. But are they?
- A gripping tale about finding your place in a world divided by race, class and culture.
What Steam players say
Recent verbatim reviews from Steam — separate from playze.io community reviews below.
The writing, the characters, and the excellent voice acting are all top-notch. If you like choice-based games, you’ll love this one. The 2D art and animation is gorgeous, but the 3D models are rather low poly and the controls and animations are a bit clunky, but you quickly get used to it. Unfortunately I found the game would have hang-ups and stutters in scenes with a lot of characters. The only fix for this seemed to be turning the graphics to low. My computer should be more than able to handle this game, so there are clearly some problems with optimization. The lack of manual saving can be frustrating when you’re looking to explore different outcomes because you end up having to replay books or even the game from the beginning. Fortunately, it is easy to click through dialogue quickly and the sketches of pivotal moments in the game help remind you of choices you made previously. The endings can be a bit confusing and I was left unsatisfied and wondering what happened to many characters. What happened to Daniel and Elisa, Ian and the navigator (his name escapes me), Undra and Caleb? I think that if little paragraphs were added to the epilogue about where characters ended up, i…1 found this helpful
A solid game with an alternate history story. It's a bit on the short side but the pacing is good. The art is quite neat, the portraits and cutscene drawings being quite well made. The 3D aspect of the game was a bit more meh for me - the assets look nice but it feels a bit like a chore at times to navigate through the maps because of the camera angle and the slow walk speed - nothing however that I would consider detrimental. I recommend this for anyone who wants a short interactive story that is interesting enough albeit not particularly deep or heavy.1 found this helpful
what the h*ll was that
Fantastic!
I regret the outcome of my choices in the final scene, but would still very much recommend this game to others! The (alternate) history and politics are so deeply considered, and it was an engrossing experience. Well worth a try!
I waited almost a decade to finally play book 3 and 4. .
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