Intro

"The Heart's Fallacy" is a short horror puzzle game developed by KazukiT126 using RPG Maker MV for another game jam over on itch.io. In this case it was created for The Icehouse Jam 2019 and the theme was myths and legends. And this game managed to do rather well for itself. It managed to beat out 17 other submissions in order to earn 2nd place. Though, I'll admit this game isn't entirely in my wheelhouse.

The Theme

While this game is rather short at around 20 to 25 minutes to complete. The game does manage to attach this theme to the game by having the player trying to avoid being eaten by Phobetor while being added by his brother Morpheus, the God of Dreams.

Story
Summary

You play as Aurora, a teenage girl, whose bond with her mother is rather strained at the moment due to a tragic event that has recently shaken the family to it's core. And in order to move on from this tragedy mother and daughter have been putting distance between themselves as well as given room for Phobetor, the personification of nightmares, to try and eat them. And he's decided to start with Aurora. Thankfully Phobetor's brother is on our side, but he alone won't be enough to save us. So if you want to live you better be ready to put on your thinking cap since the only way to truly escape a realm comprised of dreams within dreams is to beat a few puzzles.

Greatest Strength/Weakness

On the plus side "The Heart's Fallacy" actually manages to capture a lot more human emotion than "Blessed Relic Chronis" in my opinion. As a result it's a lot easier to engage with the story. At the same time the dialogue still needs a little cleaning up at points. Probably the most obvious example of this issue is shown below.



At the same time the few issues remaining really don't hinder the player's ability to understand what the develop meant. So if the few spelling errors and whatnot are left in it then won't be that big of a deal.

Gameplay

As mentioned before this game contains a few puzzles. These puzzles range from playing hide and seek with your parents. Though I didn't test to see if it was possible to find Aurora's dad or not. At any rate the hide and seek section of the game is rather easy since your parent's are only allowed to hide within the confines of two rooms. So it really won't take the player that long to find them as long as they are interacting with the various trees and bushes.

The second puzzle is moving the pieces of a puzzle into position. A challenge that is a bit harder since you can accidentally push pieces into locations that make solving the puzzle impossible.



Thankfully you can use various green crystals to reset the puzzle. And while I didn't try to stress test this system. I don't think it's possible to cut yourself off from all of the reset switches.

And the final puzzles requires you to activate a series of colored magic circles from lightest to darkest. And while normally this would be quite the challenge in my opinion, but the developer actually provides the player with a cheat sheet that gives them the answer. So this puzzle is pretty easy if your willing to accept the hand out the developer is giving you.

Graphics

On the graphical side of things this game feels like a notable step up from some of the other projects from this developer that I've covered in the past. And it's pretty obvious that at least some of the assets in this game were created by the developer. So this game definitely manages to have a bit of a unique flair to it.

Sound

Sound wise I thought the game was rather average, but I'm more than willing to admit that I tend to be hard to please when it comes to this category. Unless your background music catches my ear and makes me wish I could listen to that song on my downtime. I'm probably going to mostly forget what the game sounded like after turning it off.

Conclusion

"The Heart's Fallacy" is a short horror puzzle game that is worth a quick look if your fan of casual puzzles and horror stories that end with the evil entity getting their just deserts. In fact, the horror in this game is so mild it's barely worthy of the horror tag in my opinion, but if you do go into this one realize it's pretty story heavy. So be prepared to spend the bulk of your time reading dialogue.