Where Is My Heart?
Developer: Bernie Schulenburg (Universität Ulm)
Nomination: Student Showcase
Platform: Windows, Mac OSX (demo available)
Website
Description: Navigate your way through family life’s happy moments and strife using your awesome platforming skills.

Adam’s Thoughts:
If you’ve ever heard of Scott McCloud’s infinite canvas, you’ll be in much better shape to understand Where Is My Heart? It’s like a single screen 2d platformer (think Donkey Kong) that has been cut into a tile mosaic and all the pieces shuffled. It’s disorienting and occasionally frustrating to navigate, but never boring.

The rest of the gameplay revolves around solving puzzles that largely consist of figuring out how to interact with blocks. This part isn’t terribly interesting, though you do produce green and pink hearts as you figure things out. These hearts are supposed to be sad and happy memories that you’ve accumulated during play, though the theme feels a little ad hoc because you only ever hear about it from the game’s web page.

Also notable is the fact that you serially control three avatars, which gives the game a Lost Vikings feel. Where Is My Heart lacks that game’s sense of humor, but has the same potential for pseudo-cooperative play. Sadly, the available demo never really moves beyond its disjointed spectacle and into that kind of deep gameplay.

Katie’s Thoughts:
Where Is My Heart is an odd little puzzle game that you maneuver through as a platformer. The novelty in the game comes from the fact that the world is sliced, diced, and reshuffled before it comes to your screen, so you get some Scooby-Doo-style “I tried to go into thatdoor but somehow I ended up at this. It makes the platform jumping somewhat tricky, because observing both the chunk of land where you start and the chunk where you land becomes disorienting. The game also has very narrow platforms, to the point that some of the jumps are simply pointlessly frustrating. Since it’s very easy to die, you end up doing the same jump over and over again, and if you’re already frustrated from one thing, you’re more likely to mess up on something you had succeeded at before.

You can complete the game one of two ways, with “happy memories” or “sad memories” if you were to extrapolate information from the website into the game, but both ways require the members of your family to work together to proceed to the finish.

The shuffled mosaic idea of the game is really interesting, and the interaction between the three characters you control has the potential for interesting and deep gameplay. Hopefully by the time the game is done, it will be as interesting in to play as it is interesting in concept.

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