Review: Heartlight
The original release was apparently back in 1991, for the Atari 8-bit and in Polish, with DOS and English releases following after that and a freeware release coming in 2006, but I first heard of Heartlight when it was recently added on GOG.com and the reason why it caught my attention and I decided to play it pretty quickly is that it reminded me of Supaplex but seemed much simpler, so I wondered whether I could actually finish it, which I never had any chance of doing in case of Supaplex, be it way back when I first played it or when I found it on an old HDD while living with Andra and had another go. And yes, I did finish it, and in just a week.
The thing is that Heartlight may seem too simple if you’re comparing it to something like Supaplex. It can still be played by multiple people, storing the progress of up to three players, but each level is confined to a single screen, consisting of a grid with a width of 20 and a height of 12, and it features no moving or timed elements, nothing that can be picked up and dropped off later, no special conditions like the gravity from some Supaplex levels, and the only components are three kinds of walls, one of them indestructible, rocks, bombs, grass, empty space, one-way tunnels that may go left or right but not up or down, the hearts, all of which must be collected before the exit opens, and balloons, which may be seen as the one more interesting feature, since they rise instead of falling if there’s empty space, though they don’t also slide off the edge of brick walls like rocks, hearts or bombs do. And the first half of the levels are indeed very simple, so much so that I just went through them on the first day, without really feeling that I was doing much of anything and beginning to think that it might overstay its welcome by the time I’ll finish all of the 71 levels of the GOG.com version.
Since I mentioned that, I should also say that this version has one more level added after the 70 that I gather are included in the regular freeware release, but I see that the full original game, including the English DOS version, had 64 levels, so six more were added at some point along the way, and some might have also been changed. But that’s very easy to do, all of the levels being stored in LEVELS.HL, which is a plain text file that includes the list of characters to use for each of the available elements, so anyone can add, remove or modify levels at will, that file essentially functioning as a level editor… Or a cheat mode. But no, in case you’re wondering, I didn’t make any use of it. And I also didn’t make use of the fact that you can do levels in any order you choose, just checking that the function worked and I could go back and forth but then sticking to the intended order.
Either way, things do change once you pass the halfway mark, levels suddenly requiring some thinking and/or timing. That sudden difficulty spike was quite jarring at first, but it’s actually just what’s needed to rekindle interest after so many easy levels, and when I got back to it the following day I could get through this “second tier” of levels just as well. Yet that was no longer the case after things changed again, with 15 levels to go, some of the levels from this “third tier” starting to feel too hard and yet insufficiently rewarding when completed, the one that basically requires a series of perfectly timed moves being the worst culprit. But at least that one is very brief, consisting solely of those moves, so if you fail it’ll be in mere seconds and then you can try again… Which I did too many times to count, until it finally worked, though I really couldn’t say just how. However, I’d consider that level the hurdle you need to pass to access the “fourth tier”, which begins right after it and lasts until level 70, and those levels are clearly the best, requiring a surprising amount of thinking and careful planning for something that appears to be so simple and making you feel quite clever once you figure them out. Or at least that’s how I felt when I did.
That additional GOG level added as the 71st makes for an underwhelming ending, probably belonging in the “second tier” in itself, but it’s the actual ending of the game itself that’s awfully underwhelming… Because it simply doesn’t exist. Since there is a little bit of story for the beginning, I expected something at the end as well, or at the very least some sort of signal that you did complete the game, and yet there’s absolutely nothing! You can see at the bottom that 71/71 levels are completed and the level icon is crossed out on every level, marking it as completed, but you just find yourself back at level one and that’s it, you need to manually exit to the main menu to see 71 next to your player number and be content with that, I guess.
Other than that, however, the game’s one notable problem are the sluggish controls. I didn’t look deeper into it, but I’m thinking that the character only moves on a tick, so you may react in time but find that the character doesn’t. That obviously leads to a fair amount of frustration when there are timing puzzles, especially when they’re towards the end of a level or when multiple perfectly timed moves in a row are required, as in the case of that one level that I already mentioned. Still, those timing puzzles are a relatively small part of the game as a whole, so most of the time this issue is something that you may notice but aren’t actually hindered by. And I’ll also mention that some may notice that the music just consists of one short track that repeats over and over, but I for one found that it did its job surprisingly well and never felt tedious, and you can turn it off if it does bother you.
Overall, Heartlight is an old game and its limitations and sluggish controls show it, but it also still stands up surprisingly well and is quite enjoyable if you like this sort of games. The first half of the levels being all too easy may lead to some boredom by the time you get through them, and one later level is particularly frustrating, but you can do levels in any order if you get stuck or bored and most of those from the second half are quite interesting, and the final ones particularly so, making you feel quite clever once you figure them out. And you should hold on to that feeling, because the game doesn’t even bother to let you know that you completed it after you finish everything…
