First Impressions: Goldenheart (VSD)

[Disclaimer:  I received a review key for Goldenheart through Keymailer, a third-party website/company that connects publishers and developers with content creators.  The game was given without promise or expectation of a positive review, only that the game be played and content be created through the playing of the game and the experience.  Unless otherwise noted, all content in the following article is from my own playthrough of this game.]

Goldenheart
Systems: Windows, Steam OS
Release Date: November 19, 2024
Publisher: MAVC
Developer: Millenniapede
Time Spent: 5.9 Hours
Playthrough Videos on YouTube

Before I started Goldenheart, I had read people describing the game as either a return to The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind or even a first-person Legend of Zelda akin to The Ocarina of Time, and honestly, I don't see either of those comparisons.  The in-game description of the combat difficulty can be switched between Story (easy), Normal (normal), and Souls (hard), presumably because the combat is more punishing, like a Souls-like game, but I don't think that's a valid comparison either.  Goldenheart is a first-person adventure and exploration game with combat that takes a stamina bar into account.  There are no standard RPG elements, such as leveling up, although you can find hidden gems that increase your HP by 1 scattered throughout the world.  Weapons are only acquired at context-sensitive moments, and the only incentive to kill enemies is to chance either a health or an arrow drop since there isn't any kind of EXP.  One of the biggest differences between Goldenheart and most other action/adventure RPGs from the early 2000s, and the reason why I had to stop playing, was that I realized that Goldenheart came across to me as an NES-era adventure game built in an early 2000s retro-style-engine but ignoring one of the most important advancements adventure games had made in the last 30 years, a manual save feature.

Now, I don't hate Goldenheart, and I wouldn't even say that I dislike the game.  There's a lot that I like here, despite having to change the aspect ratio every time I turn the game on.  I like that the story is intentionally vague at the start, when your troupe/band/group is waylaid by an increasing amount of monsters on the road between villages.  It's never made clear what your character brings to the group that you're in, although possibly because you're chosen to try and find a way through, maybe you're one of the few who are somewhat experienced with weapons, although you do require training from another member of your group prior to heading out into the world to look for Marren, another member of your group, and to ultimately find out what's going on in the world during which you uncover more expansive world-building lore involving an ageless warrior named Cazanseco who hermited himself away in a tower to further study life-extending magics and who is likely somehow connected to the evils that the world/area/region is now experiencing.

As I rewatched all of the videos I had recorded of my time playing Goldenheart, it made me a little sad that I felt as frustrated as I had, and all of that frustration was centered around the saving mechanic.  Saving in Goldenheart can only be done by reaching checkpoints.  This is a problem for several reasons, the biggest of which is that to me, it discourages exploration and experimentation.  When you have save points relegated to unknown checkpoints, it feels like the game is purposefully being hard for the sake of being hard, but not in the good way that Souls games or even Super Mario Bros. can be hard.  It's being hard in the cheap way that NES-hard games will use gotcha-moments or purposefully obscure enemies in the background with foreground elements.  The best way I can describe how saving in Goldenheart works is that feeling you get playing Neverwinter Nights, Morrowind, or Resident Evil (the original or the GameCube remake), or any adventure game that doesn't have autosave, and you die after not having saved for the last 20 minutes.  By limiting saves to only at checkpoints, Goldenheart has artificially recreated that feeling of realizing that you haven't saved and that you're going to need to repeat the last 20 minutes.  That feeling of self-loathing for forgetting to pull open the menu and clicking a button, taking all of a couple of seconds because you got caught up in the story and action, is a horrible feeling.

I do have a solution, and a rather simple one at that, too, because I'm not about to criticize (this time) a core game mechanic without offering some kind of a solution.  Scattered throughout various areas of the game are wells that exude a purply-pink mist that heals the player to full HP when they come in contact with one; coincidentally, this is the same substance that has kept Cazanseco alive when everyone else around him died.  Had these wells also functioned as a place to save the game along with the checkpoint saving feature, this would make exploring the game so much more tolerable.  Giving some agency back to the player is what I feel this game would need to make it just that much more accessible and playable.  This way, there is still some level of player choice when it comes to saving and you prevent the player from save-scumming through some of the more difficult areas.

I decided to stop playing after dying in a challenging area that contained constantly respawning enemies (both melee and ranged), and multiple color-coded locked doors.  Maybe the lack of desire to continue also had to do with dying while in a conversation that I couldn't stop, which put me back 12 minutes, which I know isn't a lot when I write it out loud.  And while I did make it back to the same area 3 1/2 minutes later (because I avoided all of the enemies I knew I didn't have to kill, it was a hard death to take.  But that death left me feeling deflated, so when I died in the maze, I dreaded the thought of having to go back through this area, not being able to avoid the respawning enemies and finding the key(s) all over again.  I just didn't have it in me.  And so I exited back to the main menu.

It's not a great feeling when you feel that you've been enjoying a game only to realize that one of the core mechanics is something that has tainted an otherwise well-constructed game.  I feel sad that I'll likely not find out what happened to Jaconian's troupe, whom he left back in Histahnia Village, or how Cazanseco and his search for eternal youth has affected the world and the monsters or if it's just as simple as bad guy with bad mutant monsters; I get the feeling it's not that simple though.  Maybe I'll just watch someone else's playthrough from where mine left off.

~JWfW/JDub/The Faceplantman/Jaconian
The Stars are Shining with Consense