Heartbound

This game is 8 years old and is still in early access, the developer will likely not finish it any time soon. The developer, a man named Jason, is a narcissist and opposed the Stop Killing Games movement, which directly harms game preservation and consumer rights. (He also claimed this game is unpirateable... which its not, prior to buying this I actually did play the game unofficially and had gotten past the measures extremely easily) I ended up buying this game and pushing myself past the 2 hour mark out of common decency and giving the minimum amount of respect. While I wish I refunded the game. I forked over the cash out of principles. The programming of this game is amateur quality at best and horribly unoptimized at worst, the only reason this game runs well is because of the art style saving it by being low weight pixel art. Dialogue skipping isn't an option despite how much the characters yap and how slow the text displays.

How long does it take one person to create a Undertale clone? Forever. Not finished. Not fun anywhere. No desire to keep playing. Yeah. Try again...

There are better indie games at far better prices than this. Setting aside the drama around the Creator. It’s an undertale clone, and not a good one. Far too short and has been basically abandoned. Yes there are updates, but they are usually very small bug fixes and spread out over time after the software got marked as abandonware. Don’t waste your time or your money.

Scam

I cannot recommend this game in full, honestly. The positives I can quickly list off, as that the art assets are quite good and barring one small bug, the game is pretty clear of other bugs. Additionally I quite liked some of the music, even if some of it felt like ripoffs of Toby Fox's music. To address the biggest negative, it's the writing. I do not comprehend the decision to make the player care about the dog, when you only get to interact with them for 5 minutes, as well as get basically no backstory relating to said dog. I understand the player is not the protagonist, and that they are their own character, but you should at least make the player care somewhat equally. Speaking of the protagonist, he suffers a huge issue that encompasses a lot of the writing, where any interaction involving him and another character is like listening to 2 reddit moderators speak to eachother. It's not endearing, it's frankly pretty annoying, especially with how often he does an unamused expression with "..." in response to a LOT of the games attempts at humor. The writing actually got pretty interesting at Animus (the animal world, I presume), because it enabled you to be kind of an ass, pretty clearly inspired by Deltarune's weird route. Unfortunately, a lot of these options simply culminated into a very difficult boss fight that, when lost once, the dog just says "We're doing game updates! How did you want Animus to end?" before shoving you off to the last world, which was just a "see you soon!" This has been in development for 8+ years. Not months, YEARS. I heavily encourage anyone planning to play this to either play something else, or to wait for it to be properly finished. Additionally I believe the story should get a grand rewriting at this point. Nothing hooked me at all.

The plot is absolutely boilerplate at best. If you can't name the game this is ripping off, you deserve better in life. Don't let the game's trailer reality distortion vortex capture you too, save your money, there aren't any real updates coming to this. This is a hobby at best, and in my opinion a grift that I wish I'd seen through sooner. It has content and gameplay, but don't expect to be as drawn in as the description would have you believe.

First off, about the game itself; not too long after the release and outstanding success of Undertale, this game was announced, and it's a game solely designed to ride on the hype of Undertale or games like it. And yet it misses on basically everything that makes Undertale and games like it great. It's unfunny, the characters and the story are uninspiring, the gameplay is boring. And after the dev realized that it's never going to live up to the expectations or standards of it's contemporaries, he switched to sub farming on twitch while the development of the game continued on a snail's pace. But more about the dev himself; probably everybody and their dogs know by now that that guy is a huge egotistical and talentless döüché-nozzle when debacle after debacle starring him took place. The thing is; before professional code devs exposed his subpar coding in Heartbound, before he made a butt of himself and opposed the stop killing games movement in a very self-serving way, before he was revealed to have made his mods donate to him in order to boost his donation and sub train numbers, before he review bombed other games, basically before any of the stuff people already know happened; I already knew that that guy was actually a huge piece of work. A year or two before any of that, it was yet another windows paint.net drawing stream on twitch disguised as a Game and Software Development stream, and the talking topic came to be about career direction and choices of people in software industry. At some point he proclaims that "white people do less self-reflection when it comes to taking a career direction", and as any rational and sane person would, I promptly called him out on that. And as you can imagine, I was immediately banned even without him defending himself. Right after that stream, the VOD was edited and reuploaded to cut the sections that incriminated himself, as he already has a known and proved reputation to do so, on his other debacles where he similarly made a butt out of himself. So yeah, here is yet another thing you know about him now... The game has been in development hell, but looking at his reputation and this game's reviews, one can already tell that it's going to be dead on arrival anyway. But hey, you at least have that fallback plan of opening a bakery, boooiiiiiiii.