You there. Get over here. Hold my scalpel.

Look, I don't have a lot of time to tell you this, but this game is important. Historically speaking, it's doing more to push the boundaries of this medium than any other games in recent memory. Scalpel. Good. Now put your hands here and apply pressure.

We need this thing alive. It barely arrived to us at all, and its condition was not good. It's getting better, but it's going to die if we don't do something. I confess, I meant to tend to it sooner but I was distracted. I broke my promise. Take this flask and pour a few milliliters while I tilt its head back. Okay.

Listen, dammit. This game is a miracle. It cost more than a few fingernails to ferry this soul across the Styx, but it's here. The soul is still here. The heart is still beating. But every compromise made between this game as a piece of art and a commercial product will have been a waste if you don't turn those bills into bandages and staunch the flow.

And for God's sake, mind your bedside manner. Listen to its story, even if it's hard. Offer a kind word. Bring visitors. Hell, throw a party and invite anyone you know. We can argue another day whether the life of every game is worth saving -- whether every single idea deserves to see the light of day. Right now, I'm telling you that this one is in danger of bleeding out on the floor, and you can help.

A word of advice. You will want to do everything, save everyone, including yourself, all without compromising your morals. I don't know if it's possible. Likely, you will have to compromise one or all of those things just to see the end. That's okay. That's the way the game is meant to be played. You aren't missing things by failing. Don't be discouraged. Keep trying. Put any paltry comparisons to other difficult games out of your mind. You do not win by restarting again and again until you get it right. You will stumble through this performance, start to finish. Accidents happen. Actors die, understudies die, each is replaceable. But you have to see it through.

The show must go on. Keep the scalpel. When Mark calls your name, just walk onto the stage.

// marshy - 8/7/2020 - initial commit
// spoilers ahead

You've always written in negative logic, as a rule. It was just your default state of mind while working through programming problems. If the conditions aren't quite right, if the stars aren't aligned, if the flags aren't all up... deal with that first. That's the most likely outcome anyway, right? Maybe that's because you couldn't conceive of everything going according to plan. Some would call that pessimistic, but why write for edge cases that may never happen?

Else Heart.Break() is a game about unmet expectations. Your new job sounded way cooler on the phone. Cold-selling soda to strangers on the street? Might as well be busking. You hoped city life would be vibrant and exciting... and sometimes it is, but other times the neighbors are rude, your accommodations are dingy, your crush is in a relationship already, and the local government seems c̙̫͑̎o͙̬͊̅ͨ͋ͤ͂ͮr̮̭̞͙̽̇̒ͫ̎ͅr̝u̻͂ͩ̅̐̔ͥ͗p̦̖͙̗͕̩̑̔ͨ̍t̙̠̟͍̹̏ͬ͆̈́. But, here you are.

Maybe you heard about Else Heart.Break() as a phenomenal open-world game about programming and love and youthful rebellion or whatever, but you booted it up and just kind of wandered around for hours trying to sell sodas or buy shoes, and when do we get to the good part? And I sympathize there. I bought this game in 2016 and bounced right off many times until years later. I can't promise it will grab you on your first try. The opening is slow, and the path forward is barely marked. If that sounds surmountable to you though, read on.

Pixie keeps inviting me to parties. I don't know what to do with myself when I get there. I'm too awkward to dance. I don't like beer that much so I feel like a buzzkill. I try to make conversation but every exchange winds up in the same ruts over and over. The weather. Those stupid bureaucrats around town. Plans for next weekend (another party).I know some of these guys are supposed to be activists or hackers or something, but they won't talk about it to me. Even Hank, the maintenance guy, seems to know something about it! Why can't I become a hacker too?

The way the game is "intended" to be played, i.e. following the story progression, won't point you to your first hacking tools for quite a while. It takes some persistence, and the game actively sends you down a few dead ends before turning you loose on its main mechanics. Unfortunately, the story feels half-finished, like an early rehearsal long before opening night. The middle feels the strongest, once you've established yourself with the main cast, but before the rising action leading up to the climax. That's when things start getting kind of helter-skelter. Lots of the story beats are interesting in isolation, but without much regard for the connective tissue in-between.

So why? Why do you keep showing up these SPRUM meetings or whatever Yulian called them? You remember the excitement of passing the hacking tests and getting formally inducted into the underground programming ring. After days of wandering Dorisburg aimlessly, you felt like you'd finally found a place to belong. To put your talents to use. Maybe it was just an excuse to see Pixie. Less said about that, the better... Since Ivan went missing, you've learned a lot of new coding tricks, but aren't a single step closer to saving him or stopping Monad. Your programs feel like solutions in search of problems.

And that's the central tragedy of this game. SPRAK is so much fun to use. It rewards your curiosity with reality-bending powers that nonetheless have barely any practical use. You are functionally God by the end of things, with not much to do but look for challenges or secrets, or go trigger the credits. I wish the story were more coherent. I wish there were more heists with tricky, open-ended problems to solve. I wish your power curve was more regulated, either by stricter progression or opposing forces that could interfere with you in more interesting ways.

It's always been "if things go wrong, I'll do this" first. Always "if conditions are not ideal, try something else." Better to save yourself the trouble. But you've traversed that tree hundreds of times. You know every branch and leaf. Maybe it's time to write that last case, for when the stars align and everything goes right for a change. Even if it never executes, it'll be nice to imagine that something will be waiting to happen if it does.

Would I recommend you play this flawed, earnest, messy game? If the caveats above sound like deal-breakers to you, then maybe give it a miss.

Else...