Three and Out – ‘Heart of the Woods’

It is Flora Eloise’s recommendation that you listen to In Love With a Ghost’s “Heart of the Woods” while reading this review.

I picked up Heart of the Woods expecting a simplistic, happy-go-lucky dating sim about two young women who fall in love. I was committing the ultimate literary sin: judging a book by its cover. By the time the credits rolled after my playthrough, I couldn’t believe how much I had just underestimated the game. What began as a casual grab from a sale on the Humble store quickly became one of the most engrossing narrative experiences I’ve had in a visual novel since my first playthrough of Doki Doki Literature Club, albeit not as gruesome. Heart of the Woods doesn’t advertise itself as a wonderous world filled with richly written characters and an ancient magical realism beyond the limits of most romance-focused visual novels, yet it weaves together a complex narrative that takes multiple first-person perspectives together into a believable but impossibly supernatural story. Beyond all of the awesome mythological elements, Heart of the Woods is ultimately a story that explores how we can normalize young women finding romantic love with same gendered partners, and how that genuine love can heal the world rather than tear it apart.

Heart of the Woods adheres to the visual novel genre, with no minigames or filler to speak of. The “gameplay” only consists in choices and narrative reception as you click through each chapter. The game’s protagonists, Tara and Maddie, host a viral internet show known as  “Taranormal,” which explores areas of the world that are reputed to be haunted by supernatural occurrences. The duo receive an invite to a distant, frigid location, and arrive to a hostile town filled with people reluctant to reveal the stories of their hometown. The spooky setting quickly unfolds into a dramatic series of tense relationships, revealing layers about each character that slowly unravel them into vulnerable people. Make no mistake: dark things happen to the protagonists, and I often felt helpless as the story proceeded to punish me for brief periods of time for both my choices and player expectations. But as each of these sequences allowed for the characters to let their guard down throughout the story, I felt that Heart of the Woods satisfyingly resolved with a kind of believable narrative cohesion that stories as dark as this rarely achieve without being gratuitous.

In terms of art, narrative and sound design, Heart of the Woods surprised me at so many occasions. Admittedly, when I play visual novels centered around romance, I’m often expecting something lower grade than most games. When I picked up Heart of the Woods, I imagined a casual and tongue in cheek experience with a bit of fanservice, especially adhering to the “yuri” genre of visual novels. This certainly isn’t a AAA game, but my initially naive and lighthearted expectation actually enhanced my experience. Because of my mild expectation, I was repeatedly awe-struck as I experienced instances of bold writing, narrative depth, fantastic illustrations, and sheer ambition with which this story takes its twists and turns. Heart of the Woods doesn’t innovate on the romance genre, but had the potential to tear me up by the end. This game accomplished all of these achievements with a purely female cast, which became a refreshing addition to the canon of well-written romance visual novels that I have experienced.

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