Something in our heart

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 26 Review

Style: Visual Novel
Played: 7/21/26
Playtime: 25m

Visual novels are clubbed in with IF pretty routinely, but my experience of them is usually quite different. Ok, I COULD at this point develop an elaborate multi-axis schema whereby works are placed on a continuum of interactivity/graphical flare/narrative pacing. I could further build to the stunning revelation that NO! Everything is in fact a spectrum! To this crowd, I could as easily spend my time diving into light physics and confirming that YES! Our human eyes perceive the sky as BLUE!!!

What that spectrum analysis asserts is definitely true, but it kind of white washes that different points on the spectrum ARE IN FACT DIFFERENT. Purple is not red! SIOH does something new here, to my experience. It manages a quantum superposition at TWO discrete points on this continuum. In gameplay this is a visual novel. Clicking pretty universally means ‘advance story.’ UI-wise though, it is an interactive epistolary work. The reader is navigating a variety of computer interactions, the input simulating encountering the story at your keyboard. It is a neat trick. Without offering choice or agency to the player, the work nevertheless envelopes the reader in interactivity, and by such transforms them from consumer to participant. It is a very specific kind of keyboard trick, but uniqueness is not an INDICTMENT of art, is it?

Man did that specific trick work like gangbusters on me. From its opening screen, a wry 8-bit-era click-thru license agreement, we are ushered into a… hmm. Ok, I’m going to need to create some vocabulary, bear with me. Steampunk as a genre takes the tech-wonder sensibilities of cyberpunk (usually jettisoning its deep cynicism), and re-imagines its technologies in anachronistic gears and hydraulics. Retro-future does the same thing (kind of) with a 1950’s Middle American sensibility. How about the 80s/90s? What is a term for anachronistic sci-fi tech grafted to the last millennium’s computer interfaces? Leg-Warmer Punk? 8-bit Futurism? CyberGrunge? I kinda like that last one, let’s go with that.

Ok, this is a CyberGrunge story of body mods, (Spoiler - click to show)aggressive AI and emergent terror. All with a Win3.1 feel to it. As a reader/player you are shadowing a member of an online body-mod community whose hacker ethos takes the protagonist DEEP into a rabbit hole. Let me just say outright I loved everything about this work. Its graphical language is an inspired take on the past’s design sensibilities, especially when things get really WEIRD for the protagonist. Its interactivity is immersive and engaging, propelling the story via an amazing variety of computer (and not-so-digital) interactions. The story itself has a LOT of concerns and twists, any one of which could support a full narrative of its own. This is not to say any of its elements are SHORT-CHANGED. Not at all! Its twists steam forward, loop on themselves and are increasingly outre’ and dramatic and it all just WORKS SO WELL.

I am loathe to dive too deeply into the plot, as its surprises are bonkers and really well executed and deserve to be encountered fresh. How those surprises are communicated in its 8-bit vernacular are, if anything, MORE inventive and delightful. There is one flourish where the overwhelmed protagonist’s thoughts are rendered in barely readable background that was just amazing in its narrative inventiveness. I am unabashedly gushing over my appreciation for this thing. Were I rating these works to my IFCOMP scale (which, per my R-A-T tradition I DO NOT) it would earn a ‘Transcendent’ rating from me, a rating which as of summer 2026 I have conferred fewer than 5 times.

The more I go on, the more likely I am to spoil things for all of us. Instead let me close by highlighting a minor detail whose pithy perfection I will assert is a microcosm of the entire work. I have, in the past, revealed that Ren & Stimpy’s Big Red Button spoke directly to young me’s psyche in a way I was previously unaware that art could. (This is totally relevant, I swear.) There is a line in this work that captures that same perilous fascination at least as well: “I’m on the edge of something irreversible I’d rather have someone push me off of it” Despite its DEEP sci-fi conceits, the work grounds itself in recognizable human impulses and dissatisfactions and does not skimp on consequences or danger. Or, improbably, hope too.

This one is great. Play it with a soundtrack of telephone-modem squeals. Or not, just damn well PLAY IT.

I enjoyed the tactile feeling of Something In Our Heart. I think that all of the different user interfaces felt really creative. There are so many things to scroll through and the method of proceeding is never quite the same. This peaks somewhere near the beginning of the story, shortly after Res uploads itself, where familiar the structure of a forum contrasts with the bizarre non-conformity of Res' new digital world. There's a lot of poetry throughout this work that I enjoyed. My favorite pieces tended to lean into a digital game-y quality. There are poems here that I think are only possible in Decker and I find those fascinating.

The structure of Something In Our Heart works the best when it's able to balance the poetic oddness of the digital world with the familiar melodrama of the forum. The commentary of the forum users is funny and provides a more parse-able overview of what Res is going through in the other parts of the story. Somewhere near the middle of the work, however, the forum posts stop and we're left with Res' commentary as another character is introduced in the digital space. This is where things started to get harder for me to follow, which I find unfortunate since this is also where the themes of the work started to grab my attention more.

The paradox of linear games (by which I guess I mean non-branching, puzzleless ones) is that the best ones often give the player a lot to do. Games are all about player engagement, which can come in a lot of different forms, from trying to optimize your path through a narrative to fiddling around with complicated machinery, but most of the easy options are off-limits for a linear game. Clicking “next” to see what’s going to happen in a pre-baked story can certainly be interesting, don’t get me wrong – I’m a big fan of these things called “books” – but in an interactive medium, authors are often best served by seeing what else they can leverage.

Something in our heart is a good example of the benefits of thinking outside the click-to-continue box. As far as I can tell it’s completely linear (there are one or two passages where there are things you can click on or type in, but these are very much exceptions to the rule, and messing around with the optional bits and bobs doesn’t appear to change anything). But my brain, eyes, and hand were all kept quite busy, frankly more busy than they’ve sometimes been in an uninspired parser game with easy puzzles or a branching choice-based one with a trope-filled narrative.

First, the brain. The basics of the cyberpunk story here aren’t too hard to grok: the protagonist, who goes by the forum handle “Res Delicta” (more or less “offensive thing,” if I have my legal-Latin right [EDIT: no, it’s actually “Derelicta”, closer to “abandoned thing”, I can’t read]), is deeply alienated from their body and as a result does some deeply ill-advised experimenting with a definitely-not-under-warranty third-party consciousness-uploading rig. Once infused into silicon, Res encounters a ghost in the machine, which has some history of its own and is enticing and dangerous in more or less equal measure; they dance around questions of trust, with the ultimate resolutions of those questions having significant repercussions for themselves and others. But within this relatively grounded frame, the game is rich with detail, toggling nicely between deep abstractions and surprisingly grounded conversation (at one point Res, starting to get a hint of what the other mind has experienced, says “looks like you came with LORE” and yeah, I laughed), and doesn’t spell anything out especially cleanly. The narrative is also refracted through multiple viewpoints: the main pair, of course, but the story also gets told through threads on the aforementioned forum, EULAs, and even stranger materials. As a result, there’s a lot to do to fit together the different pieces of the kaleidoscope and assess the twists and turns as they’re presented.

Speaking of presentation, that leads to the eye and (mouse) hand bits, because we’re a far way from basic Twine here. I haven’t played a ton of Decker games, but I’m pretty confident that there are very few that take advantage of the platform’s capabilities to the degree Something in our heart does. There are windows and sub-windows, primitively-rendered computer graphics, and strange effects that distort the text (though not, crucially, past the point of readability, so of course I squinted my way through all of those). Progress usually just depends on clicking a button, but the button changes shape and moves around, and sometimes you need to type a letter instead. Each passage is like a bespoke art piece, requiring you to engage with the plasticity of its surface in order to extract its semiotic meaning and the way to move on. There are some repetitions, sure, like the recurring forum bits, but that’s inevitable for a game of this length (it took me about half an hour to play through) and often the familiar is being deliberately invoked just to set up a deeper rug-pull; the effect really is of a box of chocolates, with surprising new delights in continual supply.

It all adds up to an impressively complete package, a polyvalent cacophony with a clear structure and arc. And for all the trauma and dehumanization of the subject matter (did I mention Res prefers “it/its” pronouns?) I found it ended on an appropriately ambiguous, but still hopeful note, centering trust, connection, and the faith that tomorrow can be different from today – and that while different is definitely different, that can be good. It’s an experience that would only work as a game, and as a game, it works very well indeed.