[h1] <-- Review written for [url=https://store.steampowered.com/curator/35180752/] 3 Point Play [/url] --> [/h1]
A Crooked Heart is a pretty stylish platformer game featuring some light puzzles and side-scrolling shooting action, in which you play as a corgi. Did you know? Corgies are cute on the outside, they're really nice to look at, but they can be pretty devilish: I remember my ex-girlfriend having one of those, and the aforementioned dog would, from time to time, get really aggresive with me; for some reason, when my girlfriend decided to "introduce" me to the dog, he sort of looked at my face for a few seconds, then scratched me with his paw, almost damaging my right eye. She said, however, that the dog had "accepted" me, and that was a proof of love. Truth be told, after that, I never had any further issues with the corgi.
So, we have some corgies here, we've established that. It seems one of them got kidnapped, I'm assuming it was the male corgi of this four-legged couple, and we're playing as the female corgi, that for some reason, can launch some lower tier magic spells such as that Ball of Light-looking proyectile she uses. I didn't really understand the story at all, as it is presented in a really minimalistic fashion, and quite frankly, the game got stuck a few times when I unlocked the air dash move, and I had to close it, only to come back to it, and discover there's no save/load function nor any kind of continue system with checkpoints, forcing me to begin a new playthrough. I repeated this process three times, and I never got so far, because, in this, our world, in which time is a precious resource to all of us humans, the inability to put something on hold to pick it up from where we had left it, is something that should be there right from the get-go.
Either way, it is a really stylish game, as I mentioned. It features backgrounds that feel pretty much hand-drawn, and give off a really eerie atmosphere. Sadly, however, the lack of animations, the lack of "oomph" that the attacks seem to have, the predictable patterns of the enemies, and the missing flavor text that would help me understand the story (as we're not really provided a background outside from a little intro animation, which I had to see three times, as there wasn't a skip button) really make it feel like an unfinished game. Now, that's obvious, however, as this an early access title. I hope to see further updates on this, and I might pick it up again until it has been further developed, but at the moment, I'd only recommend it if you're interested in witnessing the development, or if you want to get involved with the project itself.
