"Heartwood Heroes" is a quick, casual, digital board game that plays similar to a short RPG campaign. It looks cute, features the typical Ludosity humor, and has a good variation of decently designed mechanics, but suffers from not having proper online play, not having AI players, and no player-made campaigns whatsoever in the Steam workshop.
[h2]1. Story & Setting[/h2]
The game comes with 3 scenarios. Each of these provides its own story, and some parts of it are randomized, but in the end, the main quest is always to defeat a final boss. To be able to do so, 1-4 players explore a randomized map, kill enemies, collect loot and experience, find or purchase gear, handle events, do side quests, and more. There are some mild competitive elements (e.g. the player who uncovered the most map tiles will get special recognition), but at its core, this is a cooperative game - if you manage to beat the final boss, everyone wins, and if you don't, everyone loses.
The game's descriptions and dialog are written in the whimsical style known from Ludosity's other games, often with bouts of absurdist humor that work well for a casual game. This also means that you're not really experiencing an epic fantasy quest - rather, you'll be going through a chain of weird and funny encounters. As an example, you may meet a talking bicycle that lets you use its air pump, which gives you the "pumped up" state, which in turn enhances your physical damage.
In theory, players can create their own scenarios and upload these to the Steam workshop. However, the game is now more than a year old, and there isn't a single user-made scenario available. At the time of this writing, the workshop contains 7 mods in total, and all of these are either minor gameplay tweaks, or test/demonstration mods. Given that the game doesn't seem to even have an active community, the 3 official scenarios are probably all we'll ever get. Considering that it only took me an hour to play one, that's not a lot of content.
[h2]2. Gameplay & Mechanics[/h2]
1-4 players roam a map of 8x8 tiles, the contents of which are hidden until someone steps on them. Tiles can contain plain roads, towns, monsters, chests, and occasionally special features. Each tile belongs to one of four difficulty tiers, and you can see that tier before you step on the tile.
Players take turns, and have a fixed movement range per turn. The game has a time limit of 50 turns, after which the main quest fails and the scenario is lost. In each turn, you can handle encounters and/or fight monsters, which yields cash and experience. Experience automatically and randomly levels up some of your stats. Cash can be used to purchase weapons, armor, trinkets, and spells in one of the towns. You can equip one item of any type of gear, but carry as many spells with you as you want. Spells can only be used once, but you can find or buy several copies of the same spell. Available spells include physical and elemental damage, combat buffs and debuffs, healing, risk-free fleeing, increased movement range, and more. For a short and casual game, I found the amount and variety of mechanics adequate.
Fights are turn-based 1-vs-1 affairs. In each round, you decide whether to use a spell (and which one), attack with your weapon, or make an attempt to flee. A hidden random number check determines whether you hit, and your abilities as well as the enemy's resistances determine the damage. Then the enemy takes their turn, which works in the same way. You can play several combat rounds within one of your turns (until the next player takes over), but fights can and will last for several turns, until one participant is defeated. If you lose, you respawn at the tile where you started the scenario, but you won't lose any attributes, XP, cash, or gear.
Most of the game's parameters can be tweaked, which is very welcome. This includes the rate of XP or cash gain, allowed map features, and whether or not PvP spells are allowed. You can also adjust (or even effectively remove) the turn limit.
There is no meta-progression whatsoever. In each scenario, you start from scratch as a level 1 character, and getting enough XP to raise your level to 20 is part of the main gameplay loop. While you can adjust the look of your character by mixing various faces, hairstyles, skin colors, etc., even those need to be set anew each time you start a scenario.
I did not play a multiplayer game, so I can't describe how that is handled. While the game can be played with a single character, it was clearly designed as a multiplayer experience - some of the skills and traits don't even make sense with no other players around. This means that the experience suffers quite a bit from the lack of any AI-controlled players.
[h2]3. Graphics & Presentation[/h2]
The game uses Ludosity's typical, cute/cartoony art style. The graphics aren't particularly detailed, but the art style works well for a casual game and supports the whimsical, light-hearted atmosphere. The same goes for the sound effects and background music, though the latter gets a bit repetitive after a while. The game does not have any voice acting, nor do I think it needs any.
[h2]4. Usability & Accessibility[/h2]
The game provides standard selectors for screen mode and resolution, separate volume sliders for sound effects and music, a text speed slider, and a toggle for in-game hints. That's it - there are no graphics quality or accessibility options whatsoever.
I played with keyboard and mouse, which was fine. The game recommends to use controllers, but I don't own one, so I can't tell how those work. According to the in-game instructions, it should be possible to let other players use the keyboard (though you have to set your game up in a specific way to facilitate that), but I couldn't test that either.
For a game that is so obviously geared toward multiplayer, that functionality is implemented way too restrictively. There is no proper online play, and there is no lobby where you could look for active players. You can either play locally on the same PC, or invite people from your friend list to play via Steam's "Remote Play Together" feature (which at least means that they don't need to own the game themselves, but it does come with its own set of potential problems regarding input and display). There isn't even a forum or Discord server where interested players could congregate. Given the lack of proper multiplayer support, it's not surprising that I was the only player for the entire time that I was playing and/or writing this review, or that the game's all-time peak never rose beyond 33 concurrent players.
There is no save function whatsoever. While it could be argued that a game where each session lasts only 1-2 hours may not need one, I'd like to point out that real life does, in fact, exist, and can't always be stopped from interfering. If one of the players has to drop the game because they receive an urgent phone call, their kid needs them, or some other unforeseen thing happened, the others either have to wait or abandon the game. There's no way to kick a player out or replace them with an AI. (There may be a way to at least skip turns for the missing player, but that may depend on how their input was set up, I'm not sure.)
[h2]5. Conclusion[/h2]
Heartwood Heroes is not a bad game. I think it can offer decent casual fun for 2-3 hours in single-player, probably more if you play it with friends. But the lack of proper online play, a lobby, other people who actually play, and any user-made content, is unfortunately just too much to warrant a recommendation. That said, if you do have a group of friends to regularly play with, and/or if you're okay with the relatively small amount of content you're getting, then the game might be worth it on a sale.
