Ratings and Reviews by Cory Roush

I love Lydia's Heart, except my own heart broke playing it... but we'll get to that.

The characters in this story are really quite diverse. There are some stereotypes at play, of course, but you have a chance to get to know almost every single one of them and they each have different reasons for being a part of the story.

The puzzles? Difficult, but aside from a really cruel maze, I required very little assistance to solve any of them. The solutions are logical, and it always felt as if I had the right tool (or at least knew where I could probably find it) when I needed it. I'm never a fan of IF that forces you to be a kleptomaniac pack-rat right from the start. In this game you certainly could act that way (in fact, there's a "holdall" sack available to you right from the start) but if you choose to interact with the game as a teenage girl would do, you never feel forced to pick up things just because they're on the ground or on a nearby shelf.

All that being said, I was very disappointed to find at least one scenario that made the game unwinnable. As a disclaimer, I am not the kind of person who saves their game very often. I usually forget, which is my own failing. However, this particular "mistake" was not well broadcast to me and I played the game for at least another hour before realizing what had happened. (Spoiler - click to show)A very important item is hidden inside a container that is initially locked when you find it. You have to steal the container from a cabin that is empty at one point in the story, but inhabited later. I successfully stole the container but made the fatal mistake of trying to enter the cabin later when the inhabitant already came inside... basically, if you go in the direction of the closed door, you automatically knock on it and the person comes to the door. Since I had the locked valise in my hands when the owner came to the door, he took it. And there's no way to get it back. The message that you see when this happens, though, is very similar to what you would expect to see if you tried to enter the cabin with the item safely stored away, and so I just proceeded to go on without trying to restore an earlier save or UNDO. Just a fair warning!

I dislike these scenarios so much that I didn't even bother to go back and try again, because I felt like I was at least 90-95% of the way through the game.

I would have loved to witness the ending, but a decision on the author's part to let realism trump enjoyment stopped that dead in its tracks. Good luck, Diane - I hope you made it out alive!

This is one of those games that makes you feel great after finishing it... with the help of a walkthrough. Unfortunately, no amount of verbose prose and wonderful descriptions of a setting that I can immediately transport myself to can make up for a lack of purpose.

When the game begins, you are contemplating quitting your job. Here's where the first branch of the storyline could begin, depending on your own perspective. Is the game about convincing yourself to remain employed, or to realize that you should quit? You don't really know enough about the character to make a well-informed decision, and so instead... you follow your hunger to a snack bar and buy some boiled peanuts.

From that point on, the game expects you to know what to do next. Stumbling around the beach, you can find a lot of shells (Spoiler - click to show)that are never important, really and a few nice sand sculptures. You're introduced to a species of glass mite that, to my knowledge, don't exist in reality, so I suppose the player could start to infer that they're living in an alternate/fantasy world.

But again, you're just making assumptions. After a few more laps around the beach without making any kind of progress, I decided to check out the in-game hints. From there, I read the answer to the question 'What are my goals?'. Four or five hints later, I realized that there were a series of random astonishing events that you needed to experience. Since the most interesting thing I had discovered up to that point was a meticulously crafted castle of glass, I decided to find a walkthrough. When I witnessed the first event, it became clear that the character needed to be convinced to quit their job, but I had already stopped caring about the character's intentions and decided to just see how the puzzles played out.

And they were wonderful - not too challenging, not too simple. There were a few leaps of logic to be made, and again, some "magic" is involved. Even though I didn't believe in the goal of the game, I still found some delight in seeing it play out. There are very few mechanical flaws, if any, and aside from not being able to interact with any of the NPCs you find on the beach, the game responded to a lot of poking and prodding around.

In the end, the only reason I awarded it 4 stars instead of 5 is that the journey was delightful, but I didn't know how or why to start it.