Interesting to play, high replayability, good length – Heart of the House Review

I’ve played most of the CoG’s. Usually, even for very good ones, there’s a tradeoff. Either it has many different paths but it’s very short, and plays like a strategy game where you try to figure out how to get all the endings; or it’s long and reads like a story, but you can only enjoy one play-through because the “choices” you make hardly change the outcome. This game managed to finesse this tradeoff somewhat. It’s a long, interesting story, so I expected a second play-through might be boring. However, my choices revealed different aspects of the story. While in truth there was only one main “path” as I feared, each play-through deepened my understanding of the mystery and the other characters. Your actions do affect which endings you can get. Furthermore, the storyline made the intractability of the main path somewhat natural, because it didn’t pretend your character was in control of all her surroundings. (To avoid spoilers, here’s an analogy. Think of someone caught up in a war and captured, and she ends up visiting the same cities in every play-through - which makes sense because that’s where her captors are going. On the other hand, her choices will determine what knowledge and resources she collects and alliances she forms, which allows her to influence the ending in different ways.)
Review by ArtemisLynn on Heart of the House.