Where the Heart Leads Reviews
Where the Heart Leads is a fascinating and heartwarming narrative-driven story. That cannot be disputed, but what can is its pacing and rather lengthy run-time for a game that’s designed to be replayed and experienced multiple times. What you’re left with is a game hindered by its own lofty CYOA ambitions and desire to provide as much context — both necessary and not — to you about Whit’s world. I’m glad I got to experience it for its intriguing portrayal of life, but it may not be a journey worth taking again.
Where The Heart Leads is a unique game that chronicles a family's entire life together, spanning generations and decades. It's ambitious, albeit flawed, but certainly interesting.
With more attention to detail in the writing, Where the Heart Leads could have been something truly special. As it is, it’s an intriguing journey through a regular life. Some moments outstay their welcome and others could do with being refined, but on the whole, Whit’s journey is one that you’ll quickly become invested in. The decisions you make carry serious weight, and after spending a few hours with these characters, you’ll only want the best for them.
Where The Heart Leads offers a plot as simple as captivating, with an intimate scale, lots of dialogue and some very significant choices to be made by the player. With an intriguing artistic style and greatly simplified mechanics, it should please those interested in interactive narrative experiences, but those looking for action and a far-fetched gameplay should steer clear of this game.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Review code provided by the publisher.
Where The Heart Leads is an acquired taste. For those who demand action from their games, or life and death decision making in your narrative titles, this one won’t be for you. The stakes in this game are family sized, the decisions made at a workaday level and the cast almost ordinary. Even with a few niggles though, some smart writing and plenty of charm create a series of characters you can care for. It’s easy to get invested in their fate and to find the decisions directing their lives challenging to make.
Where The Heart Leads is a gut-wrenching and relentless look at how life’s littlest decisions and actions can have the biggest impact on one’s past, present and future. The game may suffer from its lack of voices and facial expressions, but it makes up for those with good music to set the tone and vibrant visuals. This is a praise-worthy original title from the folks at Armature Studio.
Good, but not surprising game about common life. With tons of sometimes useless dialogues.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
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.
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.
There are definitely people who will sympathize with this story but I personally find it boring and the lack of voice acting made it really hard to get through all the unnecessarily long dialogues. Personal stories are always welcomed but they should have something new to say to actually connect with the audience
Review in Persian | Read full review
The story being told may be considered boring, but it hides points that will make most people recognize parts of themselves, and find a different perspective through it.
Review in Greek | Read full review
Where the Heart Leads is another narrative game representative, here capturing a 'slice of life', the story of a worldly person, with its decisions and consequences. A beautiful visual part, but limited means that take a direct toll on the narrative and execution, this being the great handicap of the game. But still, another interesting representative in this style of 'playing stories', with considerable variability and changes, being more active and branched than other games of this style, although these narrative limitations take their toll when it comes to exploiting these possibilities and replayability .
Review in Spanish | Read full review
We begin to see our hero’s life as a line—darting and looping instead of living.
Where the Heart Leads had a lot of potential, but was ruined by hollow dialogues, confusing navigation, shaky camera, and boring characters.
Review in Russian | Read full review
Where the Heart Leads has a very interesting premise, but it wasn't executed so well. Although the choices have a real impact throughout the plot, there is a disconnect between the beginning, the middle and the end that generates an unsatisfactory ending. The lengthy dialogues, the long (and unnecessary) duration and the weak protagonist make the game a slow and uninteresting experience after a while.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
Where the Heart Leads doesn’t want you to play and after a while, I just stopped fighting it.