From developer Eternal Night Studios and the publishers Stw Projects, and Ziel Graywords comes Connected Hearts – Visual novel. Released only earlier in August this year, Connected Hearts has already ranked very positively on the Steam store, and I decided to check it out after reading the synopsis.
The player controls Gary, who is stuck in a strange dream, and must overcome the adversities of what he faces, or perish horribly. He will come across three children in this dream, and a young girl called Alice who keeps talking about a promise he made.
First of all, I’m honestly shocked this game is free. This game is the quality I expect of a game I’ve paid at least £3.99 for in the visual novel genre, and I am in awe. There has been so much work that’s gone into this, and they have really tried hard to get it right. Kudos to the developers for making this game work so well and run so smoothly; I’m in love.
The art work in this was quite different to what I’ve seen in visual novels before, and I really loved seeing the more cartoon style of this artist; it was a nice change from the typical anime style of visual novels (maybe I need to find more tagged as cartoon), and the artist has a very distinct style. The only thing I would have loved to see better is non blurry backgrounds, as this was a little bit of a let down – there was such beautiful art work, on top of blurriness. Maybe that’s just me and that’s something that bugs me personally, but I would have loved to see beautiful backdrops as well. The soundtrack was something I found very well chosen, and really enjoyed listening to; usually I end up unplugging from my laptop and listening to my music, but this was a visual novel that really caught my auditory attention.
The story line is amazing. I thought that there would be one basic plot line that just carries on the same throughout the story, and in a way that makes it insufferable to playing through – but the second play through of this was absolutely stupendous. The writers and developers really went all out, and reinvented a story we had already played and made it brand new, with familiar aspects. I was really impressed with just the story line of it. There’s about six hours of story to this game, and truth be told, I skipped through a lot of the lines that weren’t 100% needed for the full story line, but I will definitely be coming back to this game later on to go through each hour of this story.
The only downside to this game is that there were a few typos in the writing, which was a bit of an immersion breaker, but other than that, I have nothing bad to say about this game. It’s cheap, and you can get through it in an hour, and I would honestly recommend most people just give it a try. I really, really enjoyed this – a lot more than I thought I would for an Alice in Wonderland based game. Honestly, just give this a try.
4.5