Infinite Heart Review: The Wonderful Adventure of Wai Long in Skipping School

It was a coincidence that I came into contact with the game "Infinite Heart". I happen to want to have more exposure to independent games, step out of my comfort zone, and explore different types of games. The pixelated art style also means that Infinite Heart is not a game with high configuration requirements, and my Surface can also handle it, which is very suitable for my needs.

The store page introduces it as a story about campus couples with superpowers, overcoming difficulties together and gaining friendship. I thought this might be considered a BG version of "Strange Life", after all, the combination of "students" and "superpowers" is difficult to come up with any new ideas. In addition, this is an independent game created by a small Indonesian team, and the plot is nothing more than the protagonist using superpowers to save a small town behind the scenes.

After truly getting started with Infinite Heart, it gave me a different feeling. Compared to "Strange Life", it is more like the Indonesian version of "Perfect Day", allowing Indonesian players to return to the 1990s through the gaming experience, experiencing themselves and their girlfriends secretly skipping classes, wandering around the town, and feeling like a dragon skipping school.

Oh yes, there are also superpowers. In order to attract attention, the production team even added superpower elements as a modifier to prevent the plot from becoming too boring.

Returning to my student days, I have a gentle girlfriend, and the protagonist is still a student couple who can use superpowers. Don't you think this is cool? As a player, I think it's too cool. It fits my imagination of student life, unique and interesting.

I even started to roast about the strange warning at the beginning of the game, saying that the story of the game contains negative plots, which may not be suitable for all players. Yes, the plot is not very friendly to single dogs. And this kind of game actually has three screenwriters arranged, is this salary so easy to receive? Why not just use the extra money to improve the quality of the game.

Just as I was considering how to give this boring game a review to handle work, the Indonesian team suddenly started to put in effort, making me realize that all my previous thoughts on this game were actually wrong.

The warning of "negative plot" at the beginning of the game is not to scare people, as there are indeed dark plots that may make people feel uncomfortable. The script of the game does indeed require a small team of three people to polish this seemingly simple yet constantly surprising script. This Indonesian team really wants to make a big splash.

Superabilities are not a game's adjustment product

Let's not talk too much idle talk. Let's first introduce the male and female protagonists of the game and their superpowers.

The male protagonist is a high school student named "Atam". Like many students in the school, he does not like boring classrooms and has no clear plans for the future. Even skipping classes and sleeping in front of the teacher are just daily activities for him, and he naturally enjoys the indulgence that students should have at their age.

But by chance, Atam obtained the "Magic Red Book" that had appeared in his dreams. With this book, he was able to enter the inner world of others at specific times and steal their secrets hidden deep inside.

At the same time, this ability, like Inception, can implant a consciousness deep within someone else's heart and ultimately reflect it on their actual behavior.

Although it sounds impressive, in fact, this part of the game is about the protagonist entering their inner world, mastering the basic operating logic and structure of this world, and then carrying out a series of puzzles. During the puzzle solving process, players will gradually grasp the thinking logic of the character, and also adjust and disrupt the thinking of others due to puzzle solving actions.

Another superpower of Atam is to travel through time and space. After obtaining the princess's wand, the protagonist can use the wand's ability to travel through time and space.

There are certain limitations to the ability of such a bug. One is that it can only be used in specific locations, which means that the protagonist's two superpowers cannot be actively controlled by themselves. Considering that "Infinite Heart" is a very storyline experience, and the game process is not short, and the map is not a small game, this design is understandable.

The second is that the area that can be explored in other time and space is very limited. Basically, it's a street or a college sized map, more like a small level designed by the production team for the plot, allowing the protagonist to search for useful things to advance the plot.

has limited areas for exploration

As for the superpower of the female protagonist Laya, at least in the early stages, it is a relatively versatile type, such as allowing the male protagonist to have a few extra bills in his pocket, briefly floating objects, and even creating a place where only cats exist. The only downside of this superpower is that overuse can lead to a coma.

Also because of this, Laya had no intention of telling the male protagonist that she had superpowers and hoped to give him a surprise once she fully figured out the way. But Atam always manages to do things beyond her imagination, and repeatedly using superpowers in the dark seems to have caught the attention of the male protagonist, ultimately showcasing her superpowers in the cinema.

These superpowers embody the entire game and are not elements imposed for selling points. At first, they used their superpowers only for some daily small things, such as not wanting to attend school's future planning classes, and finding ways to skip school and watch movies like other classmates. Starting to use superpowers on campus, trying to figure out how to sneak out under the teacher's nose.

But as the story progresses, superpowers have shifted from being a daily adjunct to a necessity for solving events. At first, a single superpower can solve the problem, but in the end, it is necessary to deeply develop different superpowers in order to find the key to breaking the game.

At the same time, the impact of superpowers is gradually expanding, and the game's presentation to players has changed from a simple truancy dragon to a collection of discussions on school education, correct values, and academic bullying.

The final game, "Infinite Heart," developed by an unknown team, actually exceeded my expectations in terms of product quality, which I believe is closely related to the ambition of the writing team.

Give players a small anti routine shock

Earlier, I also talked about some of my real feelings about "Infinite Heart" in the early stage. It was really full of routines and visual sensations in the early stage, so boring that I only played for an hour and already thought it was definitely a boring game.

At the beginning of the game, the male protagonist Latham and the little girl Nimara discuss the future of creating their own fairy tales together. I am familiar with this plot. It is mostly because the future talks about creating things are not smooth, and we always create based on our inherent impressions. In the end, it will sublimate to the point where young people should have the drive of young people and not be limited by established rules and regulations.

Afterwards, the male protagonist realized that this was not reality, but rather a strange dream that was different from everyday life. I am also familiar with this plot. It is either a branch of the future, presented in the form of a premonitory dream, hoping to avoid the obscure endings in fairy tales as much as possible for my past self. Either this is a friendly guidance from a certain force, urging the male protagonist to pay more attention to something.

The content presented in the early stages of the game lacked novelty, and I even conceptualized the details of the entire review while playing the game. I pondered that this small Indonesian team could not withstand much of the waves and created a game that was not very enjoyable according to the established routine.

But it was this small Indonesian team who, after laying the groundwork for the plot in the early stages, showed me the anti conventional results of their writing team, and to me, they were exceptionally effective.

The simple game introduction on the store page, the warm game cover, and the uninteresting opening are all set by the production team, misleading players that this is a "very formulaic game". In fact, in this game, there are scenes of campus bullying, maliciously erasing the presence of others, denying all future possibilities for others in order to achieve their goals, murder, suicide, and other potentially uncomfortable plotlines.

The production team packaged the game with the elements I am most familiar with, just to deceive and ambush me, a player who has just turned eighteen and not many years old.

Even though I spent so much space introducing to you how surprising the plot of this game was, please forgive me for not being able to continue showcasing more plot details. If you really want to experience this game after reading this article, any plot presentation will affect your gaming experience.

Although the plot of Infinite Heart brought me a strong sense of impact, it was all built on the low expectations of players. After becoming familiar with the plot, it's not difficult to guess the plot of the game. Even though I think the entire game's story is quite clich é d, the production team can use the most unexpected way to make you slap your thighs in front of the screen and exclaim, "How dare you write this!"

However, the strength of the plot also brings something that can be regarded as a disadvantage, that is, at first glance, the behavior of the character may be difficult to understand, and even the screenwriter himself has roast in the game. But I still quite like this kind of design. It is these seemingly abnormal but thought-provoking scenes that truly surprise me.

This is not the next must play indie game masterpiece

I personally think the most attractive aspect of independent games to me is their creativity, which is different from the 3A masterpiece. After breaking free from the constraints of large companies, creators are able to unleash their wild imagination through games as a medium.

In independent games, there are also some successful enough to be called representative works of independent games by players, such as Blue Mountain and Bliss Disco. But for Infinite Heart, I think it may not have reached such a high level yet.

It has a far higher completion rate than I expected, and the game plot also impressed me, but for the public, the actual performance of Infinite Heart is still slightly ordinary. My passion for this game lies entirely in the fact that it caters to my radio waves. The feeling of thinking I understand this game very well and being slapped by the production team is irresistible. So this article is also closer to an Amway article, rather than a traditional game review.

And to be fair, there is still room for improvement in certain aspects of the game. For example, some of the game's built-in challenge tasks, such as bouncing balls and fighting games in arcade halls, I personally think the difficulty is still slightly higher. Even for inexperienced players who spend half an hour to an hour honing their skills, they can definitely win challenges, but for a game with only a dozen hours of process, the difficulty is still a bit high.

Another point is that the game can be tiring when moving over long distances. Although the map of the game is not large and can only wander around a small town, the protagonist's movement speed is not fast, and the connection between the streets is not intuitive enough, which also affects the player's movement experience to a certain extent.

Finally, I would like to mention the localization of the game. Unlike my repeated emphasis in the article that this is a game produced by an Indonesian small studio, if you don't have much knowledge of the production background of this game or encounter specific game plots, it may be difficult to notice that this is an overseas game just by looking at the text.

But currently, I have noticed a lot of typos in the game, more like the Chinese translation team being too hasty and not having time to proofread the text properly, rather than having poor translation skills. If you really mind this point, you can wait for a while to see if there are any updates for Chinese content in the future.

Although I hope more people can come into contact with this game, one important thing to enjoy from this game is that players have low expectations for the game. It is precisely because from the beginning I felt that this was a boring game that I gained a lot of surprises during the gaming process.

If I have raised your expectations for this game without authorization, I would like to apologize to you first, as this may affect your gaming experience to some extent. But then again, if it weren't so easy, how many people would have learned about such a surprising game?