Hello my name is Siderophilia and I have played Heavy Hearts v0.2.5 by Dammitbird.
I understand that this is a game in its early development, but what I've seen so far I feel is enough to dissuade my interest in waiting for further updates, so I might as well leave a review.
First things first the controls for this version are broken. What worked for me was pressing F1, entering operations settings, rebinding the arrow keys to WASD and then restarting the game. While I won't keep this in mind for my review score as it is likely to be fixed in future releases I thought it'd be nice to leave a note for others about how I resolved the issue. I also keep pausing the game by pressing enter trying to advance the dialogue but I can't even rebind that in a sensible way since the same key is used in combat. Finally you can hold SHIFT to run, as walking is very slow and doesn't seem to have any purpose. I don't know why the game neglects to tell you these things.
Beginning with what pulled me into the game, the art i pretty great. The main character is cute (though she seems to be drawn a bit off model in the sixth picture) and sex scenes are fully animated. Other than that I feel the first sex scene, which we are supposed to understand from the story is a recollection of a past trauma for the main character, looks rather devoid of emotion, but in all everything looks great. I can't say much about the sound design as I muted the game upon starting it up the second time as it blasts you with that obnoxious metal theme.
Actually getting to the core gameplay, I found it pretty lackluster. I believe the game claims to be an ATB RPG but it feels pretty devoid of RPG elements. You have three actions, Attack, Magic (which is just a charged attack) and Block. There isn't any movement or really any tactics to it and the only way I see this system being built upon in the future is making it more difficult to time your blocks and attacks, which to me feels rather unsatisfying. For the most part the player is just tasked from one series of such one on one battles to another by navigating a Super Mario Bros Style overworld. Other than that the game sometimes opens up for free navigation in rather uninteresting 2d environments, but I really can't tell if there's any thought behind that. The way battles are (at least this far) entirely separate from the freely navigated parts of the game means the only things to do are finding items (which I assume are consumed automatically, though it's kind of hard to tell since there's no inventory) and finding the clumsily delivered story. This of course leads me to my next point.
The story and writing as usual is the component which makes or breaks the game for me, and in this case I just don't feel it is there. The story is thin to begin with but the main problem isn't even so much in the writing itself as in how it is delivered. They way the letters appear so slowly on the screen means I often unintentionally skip through it, and the whole exposition device of the blue crystals just feels extremely clumsy. Not once did I actually discover these in the intended order, and I never really felt like going back to read them again. The game simply manages to make getting the story together feel like a chore. Luccia as a character doesn't really feel consistent, from the memory fragments I feel the player is supposed to take away that Luccia is traumatized, but scenes like the lake masturbation or the orc encounter rather make her seem like a carefree girl who enjoys casual sex. Not saying characters can't enjoy sex despite past traumas, but if there's one thing the blue crystals actually do it is convey the impression that Luccia is still processing said trauma. I suppose from the overview I had expected the story to focus more on how the protagonist fits into this world the developer portrays, more interacting with the other races of the world instead of them just being obstacles with some single lines of dialogue.
What strikes me is how you could really cross out all the freely navigated portions and just deliver Luccia's past as just a memoir or something between the actual combat levels as the player navigates the overworld, and it would streamline the whole experience a lot and nothing of value would be lost. None of the individual parts here are terrible, but the way they come together really lessens the overall impression. It's a harsh rating for a game early in development, and from what I can read the developer didn't really set out to make a story driven game, but in the end I find what little there is to be flawed and I just didn't get a lot of enjoyment out of this one. 3/5