I like the game, but at $25 it's at the upper bound of what it's worth paying for. It's got some problems but also has some seriously nifty mechanics that make me willing to put up with the problems.

Pro:
-Very maleable world where the game tolerates you doing very unexpected things

Associated Con:
- The 3rd-person camera is kind of derpy, and doesn't know how to avoid objects obstructing your vision., probably because their positions aren't set in stone You'll have to manually move the camera around a lot to see what's going on.


Pro:
- Does the concept of "the matrix" right. You don't alter the universe by just staring at an object and saying "there is no spoon". You do it by actually having the power to alter the game's scripting code that defines how the spoon works, in-character.

Associated Con:
- It's nearly impossible for the developer to think of everything a player might do to hack the game in-character, and thus you can do stuff that breaks assumptions and makes bugs surface.


Pro:
- Unique gameplay mechanic that doesn't just talk about your character being a hacker, but actually has YOU, the player, doing the hacking, and not in a stupid "movie OS" sort of way, but in a way that actually feels like really programming - you actually type script code in-character, using a scripting language the game invented for its universe.

Associated Con:
- The game doesn't let you get access to this aspect of itself until a few hours of gameplay. The apparent plot at first, the pure "dating sim", is kind of lame. Especially since you apparently are a "salesman" selling soda by literally selling it one can at a time to random strangers you converse with, rather than by, say, selling it by the crate to restaurants like you'd expect. That doesn't seem very viable as a job and feels like the sort of plot intended for an 8-year-old player. But you have to go through that a while before the actual gameplay surfaces and the game suddenly gets a lot more mature and smart than it seemed at first.

Pro:
- You are expected to crack the mysteries of how to do powerful hacks yourself, and it is possible once you are given the tools to get started. The universe's objects behave logically and consistently making it possible to reverse-engineer things to learn the system naturally in-character.

Associated Con:
- The game is VERY vulnerable to spoilers. The primary challenge of the game is learning the names of things so you can hack them, so it probably won't have good replay value unless someone starts making mods that add new plots.

Else Heart.Break() is a great adventure about hacking and programming. Starting slow and having an art design which needs getting used to, it then goes on to give the player one the most freedom I've ever seen within an adventure game. This could pretty much have been named "Watchdogs - A Programming Adventure Edition". Because that's what it is. You'll be hacking a lot with actual syntax and I probably learned more about programming in general in this game than I ever managed to pick up while trying to wrap my head around C++ for dummies.

A remarkable game with only a few little downsides: The massive freedom sadly only culminates in three possible endings, all of which are a bit lackluster and unsatisfying. The art design is also ... well ... quite unique. Wasn't my cup of tea but I got used to it. Apart from that, great title.

A little programming-centric game with a trippy, pixelated art style and a nice soundtrack

It's main issue is, despite all the freedom the 'hacking' gives you, you're railroaded into a somewhat short, and extremely linear, storyline - you'll end up in the same places, no matter what you accomplish with your programs - and there isn't much in the way of interesting side quests


Still, it was enjoyable, but I'd wait for it to hit a sale as it's current asking price is a bit steep.

There aren't many games I consider ground-breaking, but this game is certainly one of them.

I knew nothing about EHB when I bought it as part of a bundle, and when I finally got around to playing it, I initially found it frustrating and boring - I was ready to quit. "I thought this was about hacking", I grumbled, as I wandered through Dorisburg with little direction and no sign of hacking.

I hung in there.

Then the game blew my mind.

Yes, there are plenty of problems with the game - it's often unclear how to progress the story, it's prone to glitches and the story and characters are rather unengaging, but it excels so brilliantly elsewhere that its foibles are forgivable for the most part. The meat of the game is indeed the hacking and everything that goes with it: learning, exploration and problem-solving. As you explore and learn about world around you - objects, commands, people, systems - you build your own capability in solving the problems you face (or just the things you want to change). There are many different ways to approach situations, it's quite a thrill when your own custom solution works.

There a raft of puzzle-based hacking games, but I've never played one integrated into an adventure game, and it's been done beautifully.

Once it ended (rather abruptly), I found myself craving more, which is very rare for me and certainly a hallmark of success for a game. Sadly, there's nothing else quite like it, yet. I feel like, as Narbacular Drop was to Portal, EHB is destined to be the seed of a huge hit in the future. It's a diamond in the rough I'm very glad to have stumbled upon.

A lovingly crafted monument to urban banality slowly collapses as the foundation of society is eroded away by a despotic cyberpunk conspiracy in this isometric point and click adventure game. Heart.Break() presents the player with a world that is not so much interesting as it is wholly cohesive, much like its obvious predecessors Shenmue and Omikron: The Nomad Soul. Ultimately the line between player and developer is blurred as they receive the power to alter the city of Dorisburg at its most basic structural level, its code. Unlike other programming-themed games, here the player is not expected to laboriously logic out the solutions to difficult computer science puzzles, instead code is used as a tool to circumvent, subvert, and destroy the game itself. Highly recommended to fans of atmospheric adventure games.

Facinating systems design tainted by painfully rough game design.

If you are into deconstructing how a game ticks, there are a lot of neat systems to dig through. A surprising range of objects have working source code, even for a game marketed in the programming/hacking genre. The game eventually lets you get away with some really clever hacks, at the risk of letting you dig your own glitched-out grave.

But the plot will only clumsily break your heart if you're invested, or alienate you when you are confused and lost. There are no long-term consequences for your actions on the overall direction of the timeline, where success and failure don't affect more than immediate comments from other characters. Combined with the stiff writing of the dialog, the only successful emotion this game stirred was some kind of Modern Urban Loneliness Experience, where character relationships felt superficial and forced from beginning to end of the story.

Some would say that this game doesn't hold your hand, but I insist that the game consistently gets in your way if you try to follow the plot. A terribly vague in-game map, unclear environment signalling, missing conversation/quest logs, and lack of other modern game design aids makes it abnormally difficult to pick up progress after a real life break. The pacing of the intended story trajectory swings between too slow or too rushed, thanks to the bizzare Sims-style time system (1 real-sec / 1 game-min). Generally I was most engaged when ignoring the story beats, while tinkering with the hacking system (which takes too long to find without a walkthrough or prior knowledge).

As a tool for teaching programming, the in-world immersion approach was both charming and unnecessarily circuitous. I imagine this medium of teaching woud be confusing to beginners, as explanations for the programming language were interspersed between conversations you needed to travel/wait between, as well as spread across several in-game floppy discs. Already having programming experience, I found it more efficient to skim the combined and reformatted manuals on Steam Community Guides. For a beginner, I feel that this game format would be more frustrating than just following an online tutorial like Codecademy.

That is a shame, as the game really does provide an environment where tinkering with the systems in game is an often surprising delight. While conventional web-based tutorials (again, Codecademy) lack a sense of productive agency, at its best this game succeeds in making you feel like a powerful force in its world. If I were to recommend this game to a newbie, I would strongly suggest having a guiding mentor available, one who could provide both programming and plot-unstucking tips. In fact, I imagine this would be a great game to pair-program on, with the downside that the co-pilot would need fairly comprehensive knowledge of both the systems and spoilers.

The lack of modding support is my penultimate disappointment with the game. In a many ways, the extremely open-ended and vast scope of the world is both a charming and frustrating point. It would have been nice to reduce the scope of the mission design into smaller self-contained levels to explore some more advanced concepts and challenges, something along the lines of TIS-100's nodes or Human Resource Machine's levels. On the other side of the spectrum, I wish there was a way to add additional content to the existing world so that the rough edges in the game could be smoothed over for future players visiting this game.

All in all, I really enjoyed exploring this simulation, but would be very cautious about recommending it as a game or teaching tool.

---

(Edit)
Of course I only found out about the GRIMM scripting engine and the accompanying story scripts after I wrote this review as a vent to the ether. While it's probably impossible to edit the environmental designs without access to the original Unity source files, it looks like the story can be edited or even rewritten. It's a bit of a fantasy, imagining a mod that addresses the pacing issues for newbies not already soured on the pacing issues.

I also ran into this 2013 blog post by Erik, worrying about the shared hacking mechanic in Quadrilateral Cowboy:
https://eriksvedang.com/2013/10/17/on-features-and-tiny-computers/

Having been a funny position of playing QC before EH.B() [it took me a long time to force myself to finally play through the latter] it was interesting to see a lot of Erik's points validated. In particular, both games definitely diverged significantly despite having the same "feature" and theme. After binge playing through both games in a row, I feel that QC is a better game for actively missing content, but that EH.B() accomplishes more with the world implementation and potential for cleverness.

If somehow anyone inexplicably reads this and checks out my other review on Quadrilateral Cowboy, they might notice that I complain about QC not supporting real programming as EH.B() does. But ironically QC may be a more effective intro the programming, as it doesn't make most players rage quit in the first hours. I still maintain that QC doesn't have anything as substantial as the systems present in EH.B(), which works for the gameplay but also fails as a way to teach programming before the topic of for-loops is reached (QC side-steps the issue and has no support for looping constructs). It's something I've thought about enough that I was driven to write two back-to-back game reviews, dumping my thoughts for no one in particular to read. (Which funny enough reminds me of a couple characters in EH.B() who write floppy disk notes to themselves, with the comment that they are essentially talking to themselves...)

In else Heart.Break(), you play as Sebastian, who took a job as a soda salesman in Dorisburg. Sebastian's life was pretty average as he tried to sell some sodas and get to know his new home. All that changed when he met a girl named Pixie, and Sebastian soon found himself mingling with a group of hacktivists with hidden agenda.

Despite the exciting premise, I was very hesitant in trying else Heart.Break(). I had not coded anything except rudimentary HTML for over two decades, and I feared my lack of programming expertise would affect my enjoyment of the game. Having read that prior knowledge of coding is not necessary to enjoy else Heart.Break(), I eventually caved and bought it.

Thankfully, unlike another hacking themed game I tried last time -- namely Double Fine Productions' Hack 'N' Slash -- else Heart.Break() is actually a good game that is novice-friendly. However, it's not good in the traditional sense because it's a different kind of adventure game. But before I talk about what I enjoyed about else Heart.Break(), let me list my major complaints:

• The first few hours were mundane, mainly because the game provided minimal directions and lacked the proper scripted plot events to drive the story forward.
  
• The story was threadbare and was just serviceable.
  
• Dialogues were dull, and NPCs lacked interesting, distinctive personalities.
  
• NPCs did not repeat important information you might have missed during conversation.
  
• Important information provided by NPCs were vague, and felt like they were made intentionally so.
  
• NPCs often did not react to my latest story-related discoveries that I had made on my own (i.e. outside of missions). In fact, most of my actions seemed inconsequential to them and my surroundings.
  
• The game lacked logs where you could keep track of your main and side quests, as well as any useful information you had gathered.
  
• In-game time seemed out of sync with character movement, so it would take somewhere around two in-game minutes for your character to take a few steps.
  
• Your character's general movement was somewhat sluggish, adding to the initial tedium of the game.
  
• There was a lot of backtracking and there was no means for fast travel (initially, and in the traditional sense).
  
• Your character's need for sleep had to be managed.
  
• The camera angle was frustrating to adjust, and sometimes unpredictable. Many buildings and structures in Dorisburg often obscured the action.
  
• Pixie, your love interest, was literally a Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

But then again, else Heart.Break() is not your typical adventure game. So in spite of the aforementioned flaws, I STILL liked it and found it engrossing. I was free to explore Dorisburg to my heart's content, and the moment I obtained my Modifier, the game setting opened up even more. I would study, hack and exploit the source codes that made up objects in the game world. Before long, I learned the basics of SPRAK, the in-game programming language. Soon after I found myself messing around the vibrant, well-designed Dorisburg by:

• making my coffee extra strong so my character no longer needed sleep,
  
• neutralizing my beers so they would not make me drunk, but made me smell extra good,
  
• reprogramming my key so I could use it to brute force locked doors, and
  
• opening up alternate pathways to previously unreachable areas.

The more I snooped around the inner workings of Dorisburg, the more familiar I became with SPRAK. With new knowledge about and skills in coding in SPRAK, the more I understood how Dorisburg worked. Essentially with a Modifier and expertise in SPRAK, Dorisburg became my sandbox -- a playground for the curious and mischievous.

else Heart.Break() became slightly more interesting when I finally joined a group of hackivists. The few missions I went on were mainly there to teach me more about SPRAK. The story, as mentioned, was just serviceable. It just showed how underdeveloped the plot and characters truly were. The simple story merely provided the less motivated or less skilled players some incentive to figure out how to hack and exploit the source codes in Dorisburg.

I managed to finish else Heart.Break() without being fully versed in SPRAK. Still, I reloaded a saved game soon afterwards just so I could play around with SPRAK and newly found tools even more. Herein lies the real adventure, the real game in else Heart.Break(): using what you know to find alternate or novel solutions to problems and exploits, see what would happen if you tinker with codes, and mess around with codes with no real consequences. I had SO MUCH fun breaking the rules, such as figuring out how to reprogram doors to take me across Dorisburg, connect to hidden and verboten computers and servers, and make myself a multimillionaire without selling a single can of soda. So the REAL adventure in else Heart.Break() is gamer-driven, and not driven by the story or the game characters as in traditional adventure games.

else Heart.Break() is an untraditional adventure game that encourages the player to break the rules, think outside of the box, and take interest in what's behind the scene, behind the doors, and behind the computers than what are presented. The game world of else Heart.Break() is a sandbox waiting for you to be creative and come up with ways to challenge yourself. So, despite my complaints about else Heart.Break(), I highly recommend it those gamers who are still ambivalent about its offerings.

I'm sorry if I don't speak well in english, I'm from Chile.

I'm very sad I finished the game, it was one of the best interactive experiences I've ever had.

I had this game in my wishlist for years. It seemed too good to be true: a fully programmable world. I thought it wouldn't live up to my expectations. I was wrong.

It gave me a lot of similar feelings than Majora's Mask, where you had a colorful, weird and dense town full of living people and things to explore.

If you have programmed before this is an absolute blast. If you haven't it may be daunting, but I promise its worth it. The game does provide guides to get into it step by step.

The feeling you get each time the game gives you a new toy to play with is amazing, as the things you can achieve grow exponentially by combining the new tool with the ones you have in your belt. The game is sensitive to spoilers, so I will not give any specifics.

The game is rough around the edges though. The camera is pretty bad, dialogs can fill stiff, in general it feels a little clumsy. Not enough though to really make the characters, the story or the world be less charming. I want to note also the game starts rather slow, but only the same way an exponential curve starts slow.

In conclusion, I can't recommend this game enough. If you are willing to spend some time introducing yourself to it you will be rewarded with a one of a kind experience.

An experience like no other!

I cannot but whole-heartedly recommend this game to anyone remotely interested in programming.
But hear me out on what to expect of this game, before you buy it and COMPLAIN.

So it's a hacking game. You may be surprised to find you won't be doing much hacking the first hour or so. You can tell there's code to be written; the computers scattered around show evidence of this. But you can't get at it! Why?

Because this game is also a game about friendship. It's very much a sandbox game, especially at the beginning. You move to a foreign city to sell soda. You meet people there, work a day-job, have parties, and make friends. It can be confusing. You may want to put the game down, because it feels like it's going nowhere.

And then it happens! The facade breaks, and you get access to the code of the world. That's when the game takes off like none other, and the only limit to what is possible is LITERALLY your imagination (and some actual limits of course).

I think the game is very well constructed. It's written very well, with good characters of nuance, interesting plot, and believable as well. The way it locks content off relies solely on your initial lack of understanding the world. A returning player could become a god immediately, but a new player is coaxed into exploring the world, and programming, in a very clever way, until they REALIZE THEIR FULL POTENTIAL and become virtually unstoppable; teleporting, travelling through phone wire, and hacking PEOPLE.

So it's a good game - probably not for everyone. But know that if you LIKE programming you'll LOVE this game, because it allows you to write code to rule the world.

And make some friends along the way.

Frustrating first few hours. Maybe it's meant to be thematic, but frustration is frustration and I might've quit if I hadn't been so intrigued by the world and the promise of reprogramming it. Once I got to the coding, the game hooked me, but was still quite frustrating at times.

Despite the annoying bits, I liked the world, story and characters. This game world definitely has a unique look and feel. Having to learn the daily routines of the characters is a cool game mechanic. The openness of the game is both good and bad. The coding is cool, but ended up boiling down to learning a few tricks. I would like to see the engine that was built for this game being used for future games, including games suitable for kids. I had to reload a few times because of bugs but the game was brand new when I played it. The music was OK overall, with a couple of standout tracks. The story ended fairly abruptly.

Score: 4/5