Love really does mean forever in Heartbeat House

Heartbeat House: Hong Kong pits the player as a participant in an eight-resident luxury villa in Hong Kong as part of a reality television dating show lasting for 45 days.

The villa contains four men and four women, and at the beginning the player gets to choose which gender they will be targeting for romance.  Selecting one automatically assigns the player as the other, making this a strictly heterosexual dating game.

So, with four potential love interests available for romancing, let’s dive straight in and meet them!

For the ladies, we have:

And for the gentlemen, we have:

Time spent in the show is divided into fairly short, manageable “chapters”, which cover either a day inside the villa with some or all of the other participants, and “side stories”, which are dates off-site with only one of the potential romance options.  Across the duration, this covers 54 possible chapters to explore.

Day 1 of the show begins with the newly player-named character choosing one of three possible locations for a blind date, during which one of the potential romance interests will be met and chances will be offered to start earning those critical affection points. Response options are offered every so often – typically one to three times within a chapter – choosing the best answer for the current conversation partner will result in love hearts floating up the screen, whereas a wrong move will see a rain shower, so it’s always easy to know whether you’re reeling in your target or pushing them away. The game also allows you to save at option points, so you are never more than a moment away from changing a decision that you’re not happy with.

Following on from this, the action moves to the residence, where you meet six of your new housemates. It takes until day 8 before the story takes you elsewhere for the night during which you will meet the fourth potential romance interest, a young disruptor intent upon challenging the current order of any budding relationship developments. This is the only character which will change dependent upon which gender you are targeting.

Additional characters are introduced by way of the two hosts of the TV show, who recap events while aiming barbed jabs at one another. They provide regular comic moments in addition to acting as continuity announcers between chapters.

Day 45 / Episode 16 represents confession day, where (playing a female) you will be met by one of the gents looking to admit his feelings to you, but only if you have accrued enough affection points for him to want to do so. It is possible to remain distant enough from all of the cast that at the end of the show, nobody turns up and you’re left solo. Should a potential suitor confess to you though, you do also have the opportunity to reject him.

If you’re playing a male character, you get to do the confessing (if you should choose one of the ladies) but again, success will follow only if you have acquired the affection levels necessary to convince your chosen belle.

After confession day, there is a post-show 55th chapter, and this is where the game takes a sudden turn in direction. Certain requirements have to be met before you can access the “Truth” chapter, so this may not be possible after your first run through, but when you do, there is a shocking reality waiting for you which does not continue in the flow of comfortable dating sim which you will have experienced up to this point.

Without jumping too deeply into spoiler territory, chapter 55 will reveal that everything you believed to be true and normal wasn’t what it seemed at all, and, fair warning, this contains some horror elements, although not anything gruesome or visually vividly upsetting.

After playing through to the end of the show, there is the option to replay from the beginning with a new blind date, or jump straight into any of the chapters preceding the final one. The game is designed so that you romance each love interest twice, this is a critical factor to bear in mind if you’re the type who wants to see everything. However, there is a catch, and one you’ll need to discover if you want to snag every achievement available.

Note that you cannot play through using the same player character name more than twice, so you will be obliged to change it after reaching an ending for the second time with the same named character. This is done by going to the Settings menu.

The set-up allows you to jump into the bare minimum of previously seen chapters when on a repeat run (and has an efficient skip function for those, too); but if you find that confession day is locked when you go back to it after completion, it’s merely a matter of replaying Episode 8 and Episode 13 again to unlock it.

It’s worth taking a look at the extras in the game, available from the starting menu.

The picture gallery features 85 CGs to find from the boys’ routes, and 98 from the girls’.

Granted, two of those appear in both gallery sets, but even allowing for this, that’s an incredible 181 CGs in the game.  One hundred and eighty one.  Compare that to your average visual novel!

Furthermore, although sprite graphics are attractive, individual close-up portraits of the characters are amazing.  Realistically detailed, you’d feel proud taking any one of them home to meet mum and dad.

Actually, the sprites deserve more than a mere “attractive”.  They are expressive, blink, and their animations even extend to breathing.  As you can see from the above screenshot, there are mini-profiles in the bottom right, and these are clickable (and can also be scrolled right to access the hidden characters there), and doing so will take you into their wardrobe page, as seen here:

You can “buy” all of the outfits for any of the residents using diamonds, which are liberally awarded upon completion of any chapter. As is clear above, at the end of my time with the game – although I had played a number of chapters a few times more than absolutely necessary – I had accrued over 250,000 spare diamonds! So there is no need for any concern that you won’t have enough to equip your favourite love interest in the outfit of your desires.

Some of the outfits are brief, to say the least, and risque is putting it politely. This does give you the opportunity to put your favourite fellas in their swimming costumes (and the game actively encourages you) at the waterpark and watch as they line up in front of you, all bare chested and muscly as their torsos expand and contract while breathing!

And yes, fellas, you can do the same with the girls and their bikinis, so you have been considered, too.

Visual treats don’t end there. As the title implies, the setting for the game is Hong Kong, and various dates during the show take place in real locations. Backdrops are attractive and photograph quality. It’s likely that they are actually real photographs, artistically touched up. I don’t know for sure and honestly, it doesn’t matter either way. They’re enjoyable and add to the environment.

The audio doesn’t disappoint, either. The backing soundtrack is subtle rather than intrusive, but is a pleasant listen and doesn’t distract while reading. An assortment of good sound effects increase impact, and if that wasn’t enough, non-player characters are fully voiced in Cantonese. If, like me, you’re a native English speaker, that may not be ideal, but you have full control of whether to listen in or shut the voicing off.

With many games of Oriental origin translated into English, the translation lets the side down. So much so that these days, I will rarely consider looking at one for this reason.
However, Heartbreak House’s English translation is absolutely fantastic. I’m extremely unforgiving over the point in general, but there’s nothing in need of forgiveness here, 99/100 easily.
There are a few, and I mean a few, “his” and “her” transpositions, but the general text is so good that it is very easy to believe that these are simple oversights rather than absence of understanding.
Outside of this, I found one instance of “extortionate” used to describe the inside of the villa instead of “extravagant”, which I found amusing and entirely forgivable. We all have moments where the correct word just won’t come.

A further word on localisation which I think deserves special praise was the decision to give each of the characters an English name (in addition to their native one) which is used throughout the narrative. As an old English head, I do find Oriental names challenging and difficult to read as fluently as the rest of any text subjected to translation, so to find this additional courtesy was a huge bonus which left me very impressed.

Overall, I enjoyed the game so much (it has been a long time since I clocked over 50 hours in a visual novel) that I purchased the DLC, too.

Obviously this is a great deal shorter than the main game (and sadly the English names bonus didn’t carry over) but there are still eight mini stories to enjoy which serve as a continuation from the “Truth” chapter and underline the heading of this review, that love really does outlast death in the world of Heartbeat House. I’m also going to quickly add in here, that although I found Miles just too young to want to absorb myself in a romance with him in the main storyline, he has matured really rather nicely by the time of the DLC. Clearly still the same person (or is he?), and yet obviously several years older. Amazing artwork, and a fitting tribute to the quality of the overall package.

At the offer price, Heartbeat House should be an absolute gimme for every fan of Dating Sims, or Visual Novels, or both. A truly excellent product.

Abridged review posted on Steam ➞

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