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For several years now, we’ve seen a surge in the number of games designed to look and feel like retro horror games. The PS1 era seems to garner the most attention, with many titles emulating its distinctive 32-bit polygonal aesthetic. While the majority of those games don’t go past bite-sized proof-of-concept projects, Heartworm is a game that vowed to become a fully-developed game of a similar length to some of the classics of yesteryear.
Developed by solo indie game developer Vincent Adinolfi and published by DreadXP, Heartworm immerses players in the story of the protagonist, Sam, as she searches for answers and closure regarding her past and the deaths of her beloved family members. Does the game succeed on its own merits, or fall into the common pitfalls that often affect games aiming to evoke nostalgia?
When first jumping into Heartworm, you’re thrust into a low-poly world where the exploration and puzzle-solving start very quickly. You’re also met with a showcase of some gorgeous visuals and art design that calls back to a past era, while also making certain improvements that were rarely seen on the gaming hardware of the past. Sweeping, dynamic camera angles move around to build awe, tension, and dread, and most of the game’s environments showcase some gorgeous texture work and 3D modeling that the consoles of the 1990s would’ve had a hard time producing, while still feeling authentic and not breaking the immersion or style at all.
Some impressive lighting effects round out the visual package, creating an experience that’s quite impressive to look at despite being made by such a small team. It goes a long way to keep you engaged with the game, as you start easing your way into its various challenges and obstacles.
As far as obstacles go, you’ll end up facing a variety of puzzles and enemy encounters throughout the experience, with a pretty solid balance in encounter difficulty that forces you to be smart about which enemies you evade versus the ones you choose to combat. Resources for fighting enemies appear in the form of health refills and film for your camera, and both are quite limited throughout the game, making you choose wisely which of the more difficult enemies to use your supplies on.
There are a few game mechanics that are introduced early on, but then seem to be underused or just forgotten about after a certain point in the game, like using the camera’s flash to lighten dark areas or installing camera mods. Though this doesn’t necessarily act as a detriment to the game, it just feels like more could have been done with these mechanics.
There’s also a handful of boss encounters throughout Heartworm, where the difficulty can spike a little bit, but the variety of enemy types is nice and the enemy designs of all types are well-designed to be creepy and intimidating across the board. This constantly adds tension and danger to most of your time spent in this world.
As for the puzzles, most of them are a little on the easier side, but still complex enough where some thought is required and even some note-taking from time to time. This makes for a satisfying puzzle experience, even if there’s some backtracking that will tend to happen as you make your choices of what to explore and in what order. Overall, the exploration felt well-handled and never quite obtuse enough to truly get stuck for very long, which is a delicate thing to tackle in this type of game.
The map system is fairly excellent, feeling akin to a Silent Hill map, where things of interest are marked as you explore, and it helps give you a better layout of the game’s environments for better navigation through its series of mostly fixed camera angles. However, since it lacks any icon or avatar to denote where your character is and what direction they’re facing, this can be more disorienting than you might expect sometimes. While the environments throughout the game are gorgeous to look at and well-designed in general, some of the camera angles can make for some awkward moments of getting lost or going off-screen without the camera changing to follow you quickly enough.
Moving on to the audio aspect of the aesthetics, while there is some very nice (but accurately crunchy) sound design throughout the game, there’s only one or two music tracks in the game that added any tension or dread to your journey, with most of it falling on the calm or “chill” side of things. This seems to work against the aim of the game being a horror experience from time to time. There are certainly still times where the dread and tension are there, but it’s not often, particularly because of the music.
While on the subject of music, this brings us to another point of discussion that left a tiny bit of a sour taste for me, which will likely be divisive among many players. That is in the way that Heartworm aims to pay homage to its influences, which felt like it crossed a few lines for me to where awkwardness set in.
One of the first things that tipped off this notion in my head was that several of the music tracks in the game are nearly note-for-note copies of a memorable song from a popular horror game from the past. The likeness of these tracks is so close that it nearly feels like plagiarism, and while it’s not worth being quite that extreme about the idea, it does pose the question of how close is too close, and when does the homage turn into copycatting instead of showcasing more original ideas.
Aside from the music having several dead ringers for themes from classic horror titles, several rooms or hallways are almost 100% replicas of areas from some of those classic games as well, lending more to the idea that maybe the aim to trigger nostalgia went a little too far. If these were isolated things that only happened in some kind of easter egg or secret area, they wouldn’t feel as out of place, but since they’re areas you’re required to explore on a normal playthrough, they just land a little uncomfortably, even if they’re fun on the surface.
The narrative writing and the main character’s voice acting are surprisingly well done for a title of this caliber and budget, even if there’s nothing particularly profound about the story beats or overarching narrative structure. It still feels like it resonates emotionally, even if it might be in a somewhat vague sense of resonance overall. It can feel somewhat aimless at times, but having a few different separated chapters, each with its own contained narrative about an event or particular time and place from Sam’s life, makes for some relatively memorable stories. The pieces that touch on mental health and self-doubt in regards to creative people were a nice touch, though it wasn’t front and center throughout the whole game.
The conclusion of the story leaves something to be desired, as it doesn’t feel like it particularly wraps all the previous threads together in a meaningful way. Even though three different endings slightly change the outcome, they all feel somewhat uneventful or nebulous.
As far as the controls and performance, Heartworm felt very good playing with a controller, with full customization of how you’d like to play or reassigning buttons, even if some of the strange camera angles can make you feel a bit disoriented at times. As for the performance, it ran very well across the board with almost no technical issues to speak of. The ability to go into an over-the-shoulder camera for aiming adds an extra degree of precision to the combat and a nice alternate perspective to the game, so it’s a great additional option to the control scheme.
The experience should last somewhere between 4-6 hours for most players, depending on how long certain sections or puzzles might take you.
It falls somewhere in between feeling like it has a satisfying sense of brevity in pacing, but also feeling like there could have been a little bit more to flesh out the experience and wrap things up towards the end. Most people will probably feel satisfied with the game’s length, especially if they have reasonable expectations about retro horror games, though some may be left wanting a little more.
As a whole, Heartworm is a treat for retro horror game fans that is worth the price of entry. Just keep your expectations in check, and maybe don’t think too much about the blurred lines between nostalgia and unique ideas. Just let yourself sink into the story it has to tell.
(8 / 10)
Great
(8 / 10)Rely on Horror Review Score Guide
A review code was provided by the publisher for PC.
