Horror games are obsessed with monsters. Zombies, ghosts, Pyramidhead, demons, any kind of weird or supernatural beastie, you name it, we got it. But the best horror — the really good stuff, the stuff that burrows deep down into the grey matter of your brain and refuses to let go, the stuff that keeps you up at night — isn’t a monster or a creature. It’s the stuff in our head. The idea that there are things out there that we cannot understand, do not comprehend, that do not care about us or our attempts to explain them. It’s the mundane, slightly twisted into something different, off, wrong. It’s not the monster waiting for us in the next room. It’s the things we can’t explain. It’s the stuff that lives in our heads.
Heartworm understands that. I’ve played two Heartworm demos now — one at PAX East earlier this year, and now another at PAX West — and what strikes me about Heartworm, aside from its PS1-inspired aesthetic and clear reverence for games like Resident Evil, Silent Hill, and Dino Crisis, is how little it feels like explaining itself, and how willing it is to dive into its protagonist’s issues and play with perception and non-Euclidean space.
Heartworm’s setup is intriguing. Devastated by the deaths of people close to her, protagonist Sam falls down an internet rabbit hole and learns about a supernatural house in the mountains that can take you to see the people you’ve lost again. Desperate to find some kind of closure, Sam writes a letter to a friend and heads to the house. And then things start to get really, really weird.
Heartworm plays like a PS1-era horror game. You interact with things in the world, collect items, explore, and solve puzzles. Camera angles are mostly fixed (and sometimes deeply unnatural), and your inventory and health screen wouldn’t be out of place in a Resident Evil game. Instead of a gun, you fight off enemies using Sam’s camera, Fatal Frame-style, but like the early Resident Evils, this isn’t really a game about combat.
The greatest compliment I can pay Heartworm is that it reminds me of House of Leaves. Once you get inside the house, all bets are off. You head down a staircase that leads from the house into a void. Then you’re on a street. Televisions are piled everywhere, and humanoid… things made of static chase you. You move down desolate streets from house to house, cleverly led along by Heartworm’s use of light and shadow. If a house’s porch lights are on, odds are you can go inside. You might find a perfect recreation of Sam’s room, or a house filled with snow, or overflowing with water, strangely lit, framed by a camera that wants you to feel anything but comfort. And you’ll see things, out of the corner of your eye, that… well. You get the idea.
It’s not all terror and suspense. At PAX West, I got a glimpse of one of Heartworm’s boss fights, a giant spider that put my management of my resources, ability to navigate space, and knack for thinking on my feet to the test. It’s a change of pace from Heartworm’s more cerebral elements, but it works well. You can’t do the heady stuff all the time.
But when I think of Heartworm, that’s where my mind goes. To those rooms. Those streets. Those places on the other side of a door that don’t make sense, that defy explanation. A desperate girl, willing to brave this twisted place for the possibility, however remote, of answers. And a house that’s bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, with a room that can take you to the other side. There are places man isn’t meant to go, but I’ve glimpsed what’s on the other side of that door. It’s in my head now, and like Sam, I have to go back.
This preview is based on demos provided by the publisher on the show floor at PAX East and PAX West 2024.
-
Shacknews
replyWill Borger posted a new article, Heartworm understands that the things we're most scared of live in our heads
