Know By Heart Review: Great Idea, Tedious Execution
Know by Heart is an adventure game developed and published by Ice-Pick Lodge. The game has a great concept involving the way memories fade over time, but it's wasted on a story that is mired in tedium and long sessions of boring narration.
Know by Heart is set in a provincial Russian town in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union. The main character is Mikhail, known as «Misha» by his friends. Misha spends his days working a dead-end job at a train station, thinking fondly back to the days of his youth, and the time he spent with his friends, who have all left town and gone on to better things. His friends all return for a reunion and Misha gets the chance to reconnect with Asya, the girl he loved in his youth. The reunion is interrupted, however, by a strange event that threatens to take away the thing that Misha holds most dear.
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The gameplay in Know by Heart is similar to that of a point-and-click adventure game, though the focus is more on exploration than puzzle-solving. Know by Heart gives the player a free run of the town and they're able to explore throughout the story. The aim of Know by Heart is to learn the history of its characters and town, with a few basic minigames and set pieces spread throughout the runtime.
The biggest issue with Know by Heart is that its story is more tell than show. The bulk of the game involves dry narration from characters reminiscing about their very ordinary childhoods. It's difficult to talk about the big twist without spoiling the story, but it has all kinds of interesting possibilities for storytelling that are never utilized. The majority of Know by Heart's runtime is just characters talking in front of
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