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Last year, at the Access-Ability Summer Showcase 2023, we showcased a trailer for a game called Pine Hearts, published by Whitethorn Games.
Before I jump into my accessibility review of Pine Hearts, I want to be clear up front about that context.
While I went out of my way to showcase Pine Hearts as an example of a promising accessibility focused video game releasing in the year ahead, I do not feel any obligation to cover the title in a purely positive light upon its release. There’s a lot that I think it does well, but there are a couple of points of friction that I had when playing the game.
Basically, feel free to treat this review with some scepticism as last year I showcased the title during the Access-Ability Summer Showcase, but I do wish to assure you that my inclusion of the title in last year’s showcase isn’t preventing me from having critical feedback of the released game.
Anyway, context given, let’s dive into the review proper.
Pine Hearts is a cute, gentle, top down exploration game where you play as Tyke, a bean shaped adventurer exploring a caravan park at the base of a mountain. Years prior you visited the park with a parent, and now you’re returning to revisit old memories of the place by yourself.
The core gameplay loop in Pine Hearts involves exploring a number of small but densely packed interconnected hub areas of the park and surrounding grounds, gaining new exploration tools by completing tasks for the locals ranging from tracking down lost burger ingredients, to collecting cogs to open a castle gate, to scaring birds away and finding lost band members at a local fayre. These tasks require getting to know locations through exploration, to the point that they begin to feel familiar and better understood.
In terms of accessibility, Pine Hearts opens with a simple accessibility setup menu on first boot, allowing players to set a couple of the more impactful accessibility settings before their game begins, via simple two option choices with illustrations provided to demonstrate their functionalities.
The game initially offers players the choice to play using default controls, which combine button presses with analogue stick motions unique to each progression tool, and simplified controls, which removes timed and held button presses, as well as analogue stick movements, reducing inputs to a single button press. While I appreciate simplified controls being offered from an accessibility perspective, I would honestly suggest using simplified controls regardless as the default way to play. I personally didn’t find that the more complex inputs did much to improve the feel of the game, and were a little clunky in their execution impacting game pacing. While I used the default control scheme for my first playthrough, I found the experience felt smoother using the simplified offering.
The second accessibility option offered during the initial onboarding is whether or not to play using the colour blocking visual mode. This mode offers what many video games today would refer to as high contrast mode visuals, desaturating the background of the game and highlighting important interactable elements in bright, easy to differentiate block colours.
The colour blocking mode offers four different colour presets, which appear to be a default, plus three additional options specialised to be visible to players with the three most common types of colour blindness.
Once you’re through the initial setup, Pine Hearts has a series of additional settings options, including a dedicated tab of accessibility focused settings menus.
In the main settings menu, Pine Hearts offers players options for text size alteration, text spacing alteration, and a dyslexia friendly alternative font (which is a sans serif font rather than Open Dyslexic) to help improve text legibility. The game is not terribly text heavy, but does require a degree of reading ability to understand quest prompts and conversation dialogue.
I previously mentioned that Pine Hearts uses the term Colour Blocking to refer to what other games would tend to call High Contrast Mode. This is because Pine Hearts has a separate settings option called High Contrast, which allows the player to alter the game’s gamma and contrast values, as a way to offer more granular tweaking of contrast.
Pine Hearts also features a black and white mode which is designed for players who might struggle with eye strain with such a colourful game, but does suggest that the game is playable as default for players with no colour vision, rather than necessarily needing colourblind filters to be applied for players who are colourblind, but otherwise have high levels of vision strength.
Lastly in the visual settings, Pine Hearts offers an option to disable screen shake, which is very much appreciated as someone who suffers from motion sickness.
Beyond that, the main accessibility settings options offered by Pine Hearts are a set of audio sliders, an option to change run from a button hold into a toggle, and in-game button remapping support.
Discussing more broadly the experience of playing Pine Hearts, the game is generally a pretty chill and relaxing experience. Puzzles are generally pretty simple, with NPCs fairly clearly explaining where to go to progress on their specific plot threads, and offering pointers and reminders as to what needs to be done. It’s a game at its core about helping others as its own reward, and the experience of contributing something positive to a space that fostered positive childhood memories, and that sense of helpful exploration is felt throughout.
While generally speaking the game is pretty accessible, there were a few places where I found myself struggling with progression, largely due to my own struggles with spatial orientation, and some issues the game’s map system couldn’t help me progress past.
The map system in Pine Hearts consists of two maps, one a broad and simplified overview of the whole area, and one a zoomed in map that’s a more detailed look at your current immediate surroundings. These worked well enough in terms of broadly signalling the approximate direction of new locations, and in helping to pinpoint specific NPCs you were already nearby, but at times these were insufficient for finding characters or locations that you didn’t know the specific route to or location of. At one point during the game, for example, I was meant to tell some kids that I’d saved their friend, but couldn’t work out where in the camping area they were. The zoomed in map was too closely zoomed in for me to locate which direction to head to go explore and find them, and the zoomed out map wasn’t detailed enough to be useful. Similarly, I struggled for a long time finding the correct route to one of the game’s core locations due to not knowing for certain if I’d missed a path that I was supposed to be finding, or if I was missing an item that would let one of the impassable routes that I’d seen become navigatable.
The lack of either a mid range map, or a navigation assist feature to help me identify where I needed to go or if I was missing a core progression item meant that there were periods of time where I would simply wander aimlessly rather than making meaningful progress, which impacted the pacing of the experience.
I recognise that, in part, this will be less of an issue for players once the game is officially released, as a quick search for a walkthrough will probably make those friction points less of a frustration, but playing the game in isolation they did negatively impact my experience.
My minor issues with navigation aside, I did really enjoy my time playing Pine Hearts. The game is a charming, sweet, relaxed game that does a lot to make its environment feel as familiar and lovable to the player as it does its to protagonist Tyke.
The accessibility settings on offer are appreciated, particularly the game’s implementation of high contrast colour blocking and its text alteration options.
Pine Hearts is a pretty chill experience, and one I’m glad that I pushed through my navigation struggles with to see to completion.
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