A macabre world riddled with despair and heartbreak awaits.
Heartbeat is a 2D puzzle platformer in which you’ll play as an individual who recently died. The game begins as you chase after this girl in a white dress. Solving puzzle after puzzle, you’ll complete the arduous task of reaching the person that you’ve been chasing. However, once you find the girl in white, the game takes a much darker form. Completely reshaping the environment, you’ll find yourself amongst someplace new, someplace despairing.
While jumping and climbing is present to traverse the game’s terrain, the primary gameplay feature in Heartbeat is the ability to throw a heart and have it shoot back to you at your will. Although that might sound simplistic, Heartbeat finds new and exciting ways to utilize the simple mechanic, nuancing an already fun idea. The heart can be used to flip far-away switches or teleport to these lanterns. As the game progresses, puzzles get more complicated, but the basis remains relatively the same. By doing this, the devs establish a foundation and build upon it. To solve the majority of puzzles, you’ll need to carefully position yourself and accurately throw the heart. Success requires planning, reflex and timing.
The art-style in Heartbeat is simplistic, but not boring. Especially before the world takes a dark turn, backgrounds are interestings and detailed. Different non-interactable structures work to supplement the building ambiance and thematically describe what kind of world you’ll be playing in. There is an eerie lack of music within the game that surprisingly works for it, carrying the somber tone and despairing theme.
Heartbeat does puzzle-platforming right, providing a well structured system of more and more complicated conundrums. None of the puzzles were too difficult or frustrating, but just challenging enough that completing them was satisfying. Download the free demo today, or help the devs fund their project at the link below.
Download the beta demo on the game’s indieGoGo page.
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