Where the Heart Leads is a narrative journey taking players through the often mundane, sometimes impactful choices made in life. Lacking truly worthwhile gameplay, a swath of players may avoid this meaningful, surrealist story and seek out something less ordinary.
Where the Heart Leads invoked memories of The Novelist, a “narrative adventure” I played in my early days of reviewing games.
When The Novelist released in 2013, Gone Home was on the mouths of everyone. For me, that period felt strange and influential. I had spent so many years prior tearing through as many big budget games as my small budget would allow. The opportunity to play and review games with less of a financial barrier meant that I could further expand my horizons and perhaps experience something that would have previously passed me by.
Certainly there were “weirder” and more niche games on PC prior to those years but now I actively sought them out. Why not reach out to a developer and request the opportunity to check out their game after seeing an intriguing trailer?
The Novelist looked weirdly touching. You were a ghost walking around influencing a man and his wife and son. Would you help the novelist write his next big success, or help him repair his struggling marriage and relationship with his son? The game was simple, heartfelt, and over quite quickly. I felt a wave of melancholia over the impossibility of making everyone happy–a common theme of this genre and one I would continue to grow closer to over the years.
Where the Heart Leads likely won’t reside as a blip on the gaming landscape like The Novelist. One is available on PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 while the other still lurks in the depths of Steam. But it strikes many of the same chords.
It’s a very obtuse game, acting as a long narrative journey that boasts a script of over 600,000 words. In between its hundreds of text bubbles, there’s little to no action. By lacking a signature gameplay hook, Where the Heart Leads is destined to turn away a portion of players who need a kind of palpable consequence to their actions. A weapon that fires off into the distance and kills something. A jump button that expertly lands on a platform. Instead, the most players will do here is hold down the square button to construct a farm building out of nothing, watching as the pieces appear out of the sky and fall into place. Players will control the humble everyman around a scene and press buttons to make choices or collect an object hidden in plain sight.
Where the Heart Leads is going to appear abnormally mundane in parts. There’s no zombie apocalypse like in The Walking Dead series by Telltale. Players aren’t seeking out the answers to a mass disappearance like Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. Certainly there’s no spooky red herring undertones like in Firewatch or Gone Home.
Nope, Where the Heart Leads is a rumination on the life of Whitney “Whit” Anderson and how choices made throughout the years pass though dozens of intersecting branches to one of many end paths.
Much like existence and its infinite amount of fumbles and triumphs, Where the Heart Leads is boring, slow-paced, reflective, sublime, captivating, moody, thought-provoking, emotional, and a broad spectrum of endless possibilities.
This is a game undoubtedly not for everyone because not everyone wants to play a so-called “walking simulator” and not everyone wants a game so tethered to reality. Several times during my life as Whit I stared at text bubble after text bubble buttoning through mild-mannered, everyday conversations with other characters, whether or not they were a central focus of the story. I allowed Whit the time to chat up an old lady who was the local town gossip, selecting the option to “inquire about anything else” and shocked at how many unique things she had to say. I bullshitted around with my brother Sege countless times knowing it would not progress the scene.
There’s a strange kind of reverence for the mundanity of real life. Armature Games could have trimmed a significant portion of those 600,000 words scrubbing out the less important conversations but chose not to, several times over.
During those long stretches of inane conversation I thought about the many people who will play Where the Heart Leads and find it far too slow-paced, far too enamored with its own writing. Though the game’s prose is by no means verbose and out of place, I understand where complaints may bubble up. Long stretches of conversation can get in the way of progressing the central narrative and its many peaks and valleys. There’s moments of backtracking where Whit runs around a scene checking off boxes of things to do. Often it feels unnecessary but I honestly cannot imagine the game without it.
Where the Heart Leads begins with Whit, his wife Rene, and two children waking up to a massive sinkhole swallowing up their property. The family dog is precariously stuck several feet down and players have the option to choose whether or not they approach rescuing the dog with compassion or frustration. Is the dog another family member or just a nuisance? Either way, Whit’s pulley system consisting of a bathroom tub attached to a rope hung up by a tree branch fails him, causing him to tumble deep into the sinkhole.
At the bottom of everything, Whit begins to re-experience his life. He will look back on his teen years and his budding romance with Rene. He’ll move on to his adult life and his struggles with his brother. And then on and on, into a full-blown parent, guiding his children through life’s lessons, and then on and on further.
Throughout the game, players make choices as Whit. Do you chastise your father for not heeding his own advice over responsibility? Do you help Rene with her dreams? Do you take a backseat to your own goals and hopes?
Games like Mass Effect have been praised for their player agency and the ability to spurn choice and how it dictates the narrative. I love making choices in games but I also find them to be a surprising mirror to the player. I can never imagine being inherently “evil” in a game and because of that I rarely go through a second playthrough for fear of feeling awful. Where the Heart Leads is concerned just as much with the minutiae as it is widespread change or the average white guy equivalent of the end of humanity by sentient robots.
It’s an interesting choice by Armature Games to frame the player’s initial knowledge of Whit as a man already married to Rene, living on his parent’s farm, already having children. At what point are we intervening with his destiny? Will anything change the fate of his harrowing rescue in the sinkhole? There may be an argument for having a stronger sense of Whit as a person before disrupting his history but I think it allows him to be more of a blank slate, acting more as a representation of the player rather than the player character.
Long stretches of time go by before the seeds of choice bear fruit. It may be frustrating that Where the Heart Leads spends so much time obsessing about little details but it further cements Whit’s place in this universe. The world is being built, brick by brick, methodically.
But the world is also being built around the constraints of a person’s life.
Where the Heart Leads stretches into the surreal and mystical frequently. Its premise signals as much. But the world is also constructed with a painterly touch, impressionistic splotches of bold colors making trees and city streets and homes pop. On the edges of a scene, players will see jagged rocks and negative space, indicating we are still working Whit’s way through the figurative yet literal sinkhole, watching everything being stitched together. Whit is also the only “solid” character, moving around with color and choice. His family and friends and everyone else are shimmering silver constructs of people and move in single frames. While trying to interact with these NPCs can often be a test of perfect positioning, I see them as undefined elements of Whit’s mind. The player has yet to put all the pieces together so they will remain a blank slate.
The game may appear rough up close but it is stylistically powerful and I think many of its strangest choices have an intent behind them. The slow, lazy opening chapter represents Whit’s dwindling teen years, the relaxation and aimlessness of ending high school punctuated by a tragedy and difficult decisions.
Look, I graduated college by the skin of my teeth with a BA in English. I’ve poked and prodded Shakespeare, Twain, Melville, Dante, and countless other authors, trying to extract meaning from words that may not have actually intended any deeper commentary. Where the Heart Leads is just as daunting a novel in terms of size but also an extremely practical, pleasurable read. It’s true that those long spaces of time where not much happens to Whit can feel pointless to those looking for something more. But it’s actually just a story about life, about choices, or regrets, even death and family and a dozen other things. Any deeper commentary or meaning may be the player or the critic attempting to excavate from their own purpose or life.
These are subjects that do not always fire off at a rapid trajectory. A game doesn’t need an action scene to act as a punctuation mark but Where the Heart Leads contains several exclamation points, ellipses, and periods. I think a gameplay hook outside of selecting a choice would have felt out of place in a game that is merely trying to tell an interactive story. The drawn out minutes of common conversation will weed out those not wanting to glean a fuller picture of Whit’s universe.
Because at the end, this is a game about the player making choices in a man’s life that determine several outcomes. Ultimately, Where the Heart Leads may fall into the “play it once” category for some who are satisfied with the ending they got. But I’m driven to see what other fates befall these characters.
And as someone who has done a lot of growing, changing, and reflecting, I can’t help but recognize that the choices I made for Whit felt like choices I would make in my life, even without the many burdens he carries. Where the Heart Leads asks players to make some truly difficult decisions that will constantly ripple throughout time. Watching them culminate can be gut-wrenching, enlightening, or anywhere in between.
It’s difficult to disclose all that players will encounter during the game because it really should be experienced first-hand. There are tense moments and ones that will be absolutely serene. The ambient music may drone on too loudly and too similarly as Whit runs across a chapter but I appreciated when it would swell at key moments and morph into something else. I was frustrated to see typos at any point because as a stickler for them in work such as this, it took me out of the flow of reading. Certainly voice acting would have helped draw in more eyes but the density of the text might have resulted in skipped speech regardless.
Where the Heart Leads is a narrative journey that will task those curious enough to live the life and choices of Whit. Much like life, it may feel exhausting or relentlessly surreal. Reams of dialog will unfold in front of the player, providing increasing amounts of agency over countless difficult and transformative decisions. Where the Heart Leads is a complex game that may not be digestible for a large audience. Yet those who spend time in this surprisingly lengthy game may watch their own personality and human nature begin to shine through these digital avatars. And such a reflective experience may be just the thing your soul needs.
