Something in our heart

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.