Island of Hearts - Review

Island of Hearts is a lackluster dating FMV, developed by Titan Digital Media and 4Divinity (who is also the publisher). It did work on Steam Deck with a few caveats, but I only got a black screen on CachyOS.

FMV (full-motion video) games have popping-up on my Steam suggestions for a while. Some appears to have the production value of Netflix series, and mixing styles and genres with plenty of minigames. I don’t think I saw anything released recently be close to Black Dahlia, a game I am fond from my early adult life, but some games do try. Island of Hearts is not like that, neither tries to be. It is straightforward: you watch a video, pick a choice and watch the next video, with some minigames sparsely sprinkled here and there without a deep story. I am not an expert on FMV dating-sim, but it seems most of them on Steam follows the same formula.

Well, Island of Hearts tries to set up a story early on, before you are dumped into drama island, but not enough to get you that interested. Sadly, every single game design decision made me lose my suspension of disbelief: lack of choices, rough cuts in video edits, and shallow and uncanny stories.

The protagonist in unhinged, unstable, both in how he reacts and the options you have available to pick. It was hard to picture him in my mind, as he would act like an entirely different person at each scene. And it makes it quite annoying that you play in first person because now you are the crazy one.

When setting the backstory, you are laid off from your job and go to meet your supportive girlfriend, Victoria. So far, all that you know is that you are a loser, but for some reason she is head over heels for you. She tries to cheer you up, and the first option appears: To cry or to be mean to her. So add emotionally unstable to the list.

Each woman is supposed to have a personality or trope: shy, friendly, man-eater… but the stories are shallow and the lack of options to engage do not help. Most options are either you flirt or you insult people. There is no nuance, and as you might have guessed, flirting with everyone will give you more points with each character. I am not sure what those points mean, as it did not show any difference on how people behave towards you following your actions.

Then the rough cuts (and maybe bugs?). I picked to cry when Victoria was trying to cheer me up, the camera pans down as she holds my hand and start being supportive. She puts half of a sentence out, and it cuts there. The camera point at another place in the next segment. The hands are far apart - no, they did not disconnect, one frame they are attached, the next hands are not in frame any more, and you are not close to your girlfriend. You are standing and being rude to her.

This looked like a bug to me, but rough video cuts were a problem during my whole gameplay, from continuity problems, to the character you are talking to completely moving positions on screen.

It is sad, because the video production is not that bad. There is good understanding of camera angles, framing, and even scene-blocking. They are not consistent across the game, but you can see there are some intents. They usually work well during “funny” moments.

If anything, I would complain of the whitewashing and overly bright filter, think about the “Mexican filter”, but instead of yellow, everyone is glowing white. It works for daytime in-doors shots, or even some outside shots, but it is very weird during a candlelight or nightclub scene. The nightclub was interesting because they had a scene showing people dancing and drinking with good lighting, then it turns to the main characters and everyone is glowing now. The same goes for “sultry” moments, they put a red tint to it, but because of the overly bright it looks more like pink and childlike. I guess they could potentially fix those in post-production, if that bright style was not the end goal.

There are also minigames, and they are simple. Usually, some activity with a woman doing something on the side, either dancing or cheering you up. But the very first challenge was creepy. You are throwing axes with your soon-to-be ex(ba-dun-tiss), a target runs across the screen, and you need to hit it with your mouse. The problem is: the target you need to hit keeps going over the face and body of your girlfriend. Seriously?

I think because of so many issues earlier on, it killed the mood to get invested in the game.

The acting is not that bad, think about you get some friends to play some sort of pretending game, like whodunit or other role-playing games. Some friends would do better than others, and even the others would play some roles well, and some only want to play D&D, so I don’t invite them any more. Same here. It felt like a bunch of friends trying to have fun while making a game, some fitted better to the role. The script might not help either, but once you realize this is some sort of slapstick/sexploitation-adjacent, it makes sense.

Also, in their defence, the version I played had a bug, and it would not play the original audio, only the Simplified Chinese/Mandarin voice-over was working. There were clear mismatches between the intensity of the actor and the dubs. That said, It is hard for me to judge, I only know a bit of Chinese from Duolingo, but, from the Chinese series I watch, the voice usually matches well the physicality of the actor.

The game tries to be funny here and there, sometimes it lands, most of the time not. One of the times it landed, it soon turned to be some sort of sexual harassment right after, and that really killed the mood.

There is this weird scene you are having dinner in a restaurant with two girls that you just met, but the waiter brings dinner family style, and apologises because he only had one sausage left. I don’t know which kind of pervert would feel the need to feed a stranger straight to the mouth, but I was glad there was an option to give it to the waiter instead of the 2 strange ladies. So the protagonist forks it and bring to the waiter that looks grateful and readies to take a bite, I started laughing. But the protagonist, unhinged as always and not satisfied, keep shoving and pulling the sausage of the waiters mouth.

They could have cut it at a single bite, and it would be cute and funny. There is power imbalance, and the waiter was just introduced in that scene. I would understand if there was some rapport between them that justified the actions. Maybe there was a sexual tension between both before and that is the closest they can get to achieve their love in a conservative family… anyway, do not abuse people.

Last, the controllers. I could only get this Unity game to work on the Steam Deck for some reason. While it is nice that FMV games do not use much power, never going above 10Wh, there is no controller support. I tried to map the options with the Steam Input layer, but most of them would not work. Trackpad with shoulder-button for mouse click was fine, so it was using Space for pausing the game. But the options to skip (Q), rewind(←) and forward(→) did not work. I am not sure if it is the game fault or from the mapping, as I did not try it with a keyboard.

As I was looking to solve the bugs and try to make it run on my main PC (so I could record better videos), I came across the press-kit. It claims that the game is “Featuring real influencers”. I remember growing up, some game companies would hire “famous” people for localization to try to drive up a sale, not sure if it did sell more, but it surely affected the quality negatively (battlefield hardline was bad, worse in PT-BR). I guess if you know those people, the story and the sense of humor might make more sense to you, or at least you might see people that you already developed a parasocial relationship.

I can see FMV working as story-heavy visual novels, like in Immortality. Or Dating Sim with more mechanical depth. Or even games that add dating sim as an extra mechanic, like in the Persona series. But I cannot wrap my head around just going through scenes being nice or rude to people.

As I see similar games popping-up on Steam, it is hard for me to tell if these problems are systematic, or the specific of this title, Island of Hearts. It is definitely not for me, and I cannot recommend it if you are curious about the genre.

Island of Hearts is available on Steam, but currently is not working well on Linux or Steam Deck.

Note: We were provided a review key by the publisher.