Heed

 in International / Reviews  tagged adventure / free / heed / international by

Heed is odd. From the moment you start the game up, you get the feeling that it’s definitely not your cookie-cutter point ‘n’ click adventure. Maybe it’s the surreal backgrounds and stylized art, or perhaps it’s the bizarre and moody background music (containing remixed samples from late-19th-century folk music). Either way, Heed feels quite surreal, and it only gets more so as you play.

The premise is simple enough – you play an unnamed, hooded… person, who is unsatisfied with his life and yearns for greater purpose. He discovers an odd-looking fly, and after chasing it around a bit begins to see ghosts. Yes, the plot is bizarre too, but it’s surprisingly coherent and well-told, with some interesting twists. It isn’t that long a tale either, but that doesn’t detract from the experience.

The puzzles are also somewhat different to your standard adventure game fare. There’s no collection and combination of items in your inventory or fancy navigation of dialogue-trees, nor do you have a stack of verbs that you need to try out on objects until you find the right one. Instead, puzzles are one-click affairs (reminiscent of the Myst series) where you’re required to interact with the environment and observe the results, logically determining cause/effect relationships and using them to your advantage. Unlike Myst, however, the puzzles are pretty small-scale and accessible, and tend to follow a single-puzzle-per-screen sequence that prevents you from getting confused or overwhelmed. Characters also tend to drop obtuse hints or highlight important effects, which means that you always know if you’re making progress or not.

Heed is odd, and therein lies its charm. If you enjoy a moody game with a fantastic bent, and don’t mind slightly obscure puzzles, then it’s definitely worth a look.