Where the Heart Leads
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Where the Heart Leads Media
Critic Reviews for Where the Heart Leads
Despite its shortcomings, Where The Heart Leads offers an amazing and emotional experience with many endings that would rival games with the best replay value. The game will surely satisfy and maybe even inspire players to reflect on their choices in real life and the consequences it entailed on their loved ones.
Where the Heart Leads is a wonderfully crafted narrative adventure, where every choice is felt throughout the story of Whit and his family.
We begin to see our hero’s life as a line—darting and looping instead of living.
All in all Armature Studio has done a good job with Where the Heart Leads, offering a story-driven adventure based on choices that influence the story of the protagonist, but not very satisfying in terms of gameplay.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Where the Heart Leads does well for what it seemingly aims to do. It’s the surreal narrative journey of a family through years of happiness and sadness with the connective tissue of a disastrous event tying it down to the present. Putting the puzzle pieces of memory, decision, and consequence together as you go takes this game in a number of directions. Not every direction is riveting and there are some definite lulls, but there are also deeply difficult moments to choose between with consequences for the choices made and the paths untaken. If you’re looking for a chill and often lackadaisical journey you'll steer in meaningful ways, Where the Heart Leads is a narrative-heavy series of roads you may be inclined to explore again and again.
Where the Heart Leads offers a supremely compelling and fascinating overall narrative, one that is filled with genuinely meaningful choices – surely a rarity in video games? Unfortunately, its tall tale is also bogged down with numerous presentation issues that result in dull characterisation. Overall an uneven experience that's both brilliant and boring – sometimes at the same time.
Where the Heart Leads isn't going to be a game for everyone but it does a remarkable job at letting the player walk their own path through Whit's life. Much of the story is fairly ordinary but that's what makes it so relatable. It may even cause you to reflect on the choices you've made in your own life and how you may have helped or hindered those around you.
The game does land one or two emotional blows towards the end, but getting to those moments requires a lot of walking — sometimes with only a vague idea of where you’re supposed to be going — and watching dull conversations unfold. Where the Heart Leads is too long, with huge stretches that give you little to do, and in the end you might be questioning whether it was all worth it. That’s life.
