Welcome back to “Game Night,” Hard Drive’s theoretically weekly column about independently-made video games. I didn’t mean to take quite so much time off from the column, but I had a medical misadventure at the end of July that’s taken up much of my month.
My plan beforehand had been to cover Vincent Adinolfi’s Heartworm, which has been on my radar for quite a while now. It’s the latest indie game that deliberately tries to recapture the tone and feel of survival horror’s classic era, with a particular dedication to the visual potential of fixed camera angles.
Now that I’ve played through the entirety of Heartworm, however, it strikes me as a misnomer to call it a survival horror game at all. It’s got a few decent scares across its 4- to 6-hour running time, but at its core it’s a story about grief, depression, and the mounting power of everyday traumas. It might be more accurate to call it “surrealist melancholy” than anything else, or maybe just a New Weird psychological thriller.
You play Heartworm as Sam, a photographer in her early 20s who’s struggling with grief. She reads about an urban legend on the early Internet, about a nearby abandoned house with a room somewhere inside that connects to the afterlife. If you find that room, the legend says, you can have one last conversation with the people you’ve lost. On the other hand, no one who’s ever gone in search of that room has ever returned.
When Sam finds that room, it leads her to a place that mixes nightmare imagery with her own childhood memories, including the house where she grew up. The only other people here are hostile electronic ghosts and a monster that occasionally appears to try and kill her. With her camera serving as a makeshift weapon, Sam has to fight through a twisted version of her own life in search of a way back to the real world.
To some extent, Heartworm reminds me of several of the imitative survival horror games that came out between 1996 and 2001 or so, after the success of the original Resident Evil. It feels stripped down and subdued by comparison to much of the rest of the genre, both then and now, with no gore to speak of and only a relative handful of weapons, puzzles, enemies, and bosses.
The big difference between Heartworm and other games in its lane is the degree to which it’s specifically about Sam. I’ve ended up playing a lot of surreal psychological thrillers in the last few years, including a few games that didn’t start out that way (shout-out to Endflame’s Ikai), and most of them tend to be the kind of zero-conflict adventure game that many people will write off as a “walking simulator.”
Heartworm by comparison takes most of its mechanics from classic survival horror, such as strange puzzles, resource conservation, and slightly awkward combat. It’s generous enough with film and first aid kits that any veteran of the genre won’t have much trouble staying alive, but a few of the puzzles are tricky.
More importantly, Heartworm maintains a careful focus throughout its runtime. There is no part of the overall experience that isn’t about Sam in one way or another, whether it’s a memory, a flashback, or an attack against one of her specific points of vulnerability.
Playing Heartworm let me put a finger on something that’s occasionally bothered me about horror games. Many of them, even some that are considered classics of the genre, will simply toss in some surreal imagery whenever the pace starts to flag. If nothing’s happened in a couple of minutes, then it’s time to have a couple of random jump scares or throw in a bunch of ominous mannequins or hold a game show in the elevator or something. You can get some impact from that, sure, but that same randomness ends up feeling like it’s watering down the whole. Heartworm, by comparison, stays focused on Sam from start to finish, which works to its benefit.
That being said, Heartworm is also a solo project from a new developer, so it’s got a few different points of irritation. It’s easy to get stunlocked if you try to fight more than one enemy at once, since Sam goes flying if she gets hit by almost anything; the in-game map isn’t as helpful as it could be; and a few of the puzzles have strange or inadequately explained solutions. If you’re interested in picking this up, you’ll want to grade it on a curve. Any survival horror die-hard has absolutely played and enjoyed worse games than this, but it’s got its share of weak spots.
Heartworm has a lot of potential as an anthology series. A room somewhere in America that draws in people who need to speak to the dead is a killer premise, and you could easily make a dozen more of these games, each built around a new character with their own reason to seek out the house.
On its own merits, Heartworm is slower-paced and more downbeat than the average survival horror game, and it’s not the sort of thing you’ll want to play if you’re not currently up for a guided tour through someone else’s depression. If you’re into surreal art or strange horror, however, it’s well worth taking a run through Heartworm.
[Heartworm, developed by Vincent Adinolfi and published by DreadXP, is now available for PC, Mac, and Linux for $14.99. This column was written using a Steam code sent to Hard Drive by a DreadXP representative.]
