Moscow-based developer Ice-Pick Lodge is best known for the Pathologic games, which tell bleak stories about a plague that ravages a strange Russian town at some uncertain point in the past. Their latest project, Know by Heart, is in direct conversation with that series and seems to serve as a kind of inverse to it.
Where the Pathologic games are defined by a doom-laden atmosphere augmented by unforgiving mechanics, so much of Know by Heart is wistful and nostalgic. For one, the central Russian town is more grounded and modern, and the game tells a more straightforward story that’s absent any combat or health mechanics that might lead to a fail state.
From a zoomed-out perspective rendered in stylishly spare polygons, you primarily play as Misha. Unlike his parents and most of his friends, he chose to stay behind in his hometown, and he lives alone in an apartment complex. His job at the train station seems vaguely masochistic, as he records the names of everyone who comes and goes by rail, making the journey that he doesn’t. He’s not miserable, but there’s hardly a sense that he’s happy either.
Nothing seems to be keeping him in this place—except, that is, for the nostalgia that comes even more clearly into focus as he reconnects with Asya, a childhood crush who’s back in town for a birthday celebration. When he stands in a cluster of autumn leaves, they swirl around him in a kind of vortex of memory that briefly places objects from the past, like a treehouse and paper boats, on the landscape and dusts it with a coating of snow.
The pair meet up periodically to reminisce on lunch breaks and at the end of Asya’s work day, with players pointing and clicking Misha toward his different obligations in between. There are other demands upon his attention, like neighboring children neglected by a parent or an aunt who needs help with her luggage, and players can choose to help out, and at the risk of being a little late to those meetups with Asya. Know by Heart builds anticipation and investment by embroiling us in these choices, some of which aren’t telegraphed at all. If you get so focused dragging the aunt’s suitcase across town and then rush off to meet Asya, perhaps you’ll forget to double back and ask about what happens to the neighbor kids.
Misha’s enthusiasm is infectious, especially as more figures from his childhood arrive in town. With mechanics like pushing a car, serving tea, or piecing a photo together—some of which are never revisited after their initial use—Know by Heart seems as though it could sustain this premise for its entire length. The process of running around town can grow a bit repetitive, but it imparts a sense of familiarity, contributing to the warm, nostalgic tone that’s most acute once it gives way to something more uncertain and distressing.
The world is eventually overtaken by a strange illness that causes an infected individual to forget the people they know, apparently at random. The things you learned over so much of the game become meaningless. As people simply forget, they grow cold and distant in their stubborn determination that something cannot be true if they don’t remember it.
This, somehow, is as bad as the death or violence that pervades similar stories. Know by Heart reveals itself to be bleak in an entirely different sort of way from Pathologic, like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind without the cautious optimism. It slowly decimates the only meaningful currency it gives us: the memories, in the form of leaf piles, that are the only “collectible” here. Memories inform Misha’s interactions with everyone from Asya to the aunt, who you initially present with an album of photos collected from people around town.
Details like the cause of the disease and how it spreads are unclear, though it doesn’t appear to be fatal. Much of the game involves simply existing in the midst of this incident, experiencing the story while trying to hold certain relationships together as things grow more grave. The slow progression of the disease lends itself to tear-jerking melodrama, but the characters’ horror is quiet and largely internal. Occasionally, they verbalize their fears, but mostly their memories just gradually and inevitably falls away, like leaves in autumn.
The game was covered with a review code provided by Ice-Pick Lodge.
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