Casting hearts is a long-distance visual novel about magic, anxiety, and connection. It's your girlfriend's birthday, but you can't meet up in person. Try to make the best of things so that the night can still be a magical one.
Reviews View More
npckc is a creator who’s never shied from making games directly based on the joys and frustrations in their personal life. Obviously this is not an uncommon thing in media but considering the genres that mainstream games skew into vs the extreme indie scale and intimate scope of kc’s work I do think these traits are more notable in their ouvre than they might be in, say, John Carmack or Shinji Mikami’s. Casting Hearts, to cut to the chase, is a covid game, in the flavor of “god dude I know you weren’t expecting to play a two-years-deep covid game but cards on the table I wasn’t expecting to be one either so, fuck, I guess.”
Casting Hearts is a one-scene game where you step into the role of Marjoram, a student of indeterminate gender (and species) at some kind of magical university doing their gosh darn damndest to treat their girlfriend Ginger to a lovely birthday date, or at least the loveliest approximation of one Marjoram can muster via some spellcasting and a crystal ball skype call. It’s a short game and mechanics-light, with only a few aesthetic changes and branching paths via the frequent dialogue options, but I found some nice variation and flavor to explore across two playthroughs and two endings I saw in not quite an hour of playtime.
The game is as sweet as it looks, but anyone familiar with npckc’s work will know that while this isn’t a straight up melancholia like all things equal i would prefer it if we were safe & lonely instead of together & afraid but i cannot deny that it is hard; or: a solitary spacecraft, the treacly art style doesn’t mean the game won’t take its characters seriously or treat their problems respectfully and with import. this is a game about making the perfect mind palace cake for your girlfriend and giggling over the goofy whale that’s waving to you from the waters of the astral beach that your date overlooks, but it’s as much a game about the pressure Marjoram puts on themself to make that date perfect because everything else is so imperfect and this is the best they can do; about being angry at what the world has taken from us, in people, in time, in life experience; fear about how much longer this will go on and the certainty that we’re just not built for the kind of solitude a lot of us are forced into by necessity these days (or force ourselves into, if we must, which is harder, and gets harder every day).
But that’s not all there is either, I’m not just here like “broooo this CUTE game is actually KIND OF DARK” lol I’m not thirteen. These characters are people and they’re in a relationship and life is hard, right? They talk to each other, and there are multiple ways for things to break bad in this game that revolve around how forthcoming you the player are with Marjoram’s anxieties vs. the mask of Perfect Party Purveyor. At the end of the day though, regardless of how thoroughly feelings get hashed out or left a bit hanging by the end, these are people who are here for each other as much as they can be and that’s not nothing.
npckc is one of my favorite game creators working right now because they’re so good at balancing these tones. Their work does aim to please, of course, I mean like, look at it right? But it always comes tinged with a deft realism. There’s never a sense that things that are difficult or uncomfortable are being shied away from or deflected in the name of being cozy or wholesome. Instead these games insist that we can and must find comfort where we can get it within the hardship. It’s always going to be hard, and it’s always going to be worth it – not always in equal measure, but our loved ones are there to help up out when we need it, if we can find the strength to ask.
It's a balanced experience, one that in a very short amount of time encompasses two years’ worth of bad feelings and what we’ve made in the wreckage of them. npckc has been experimenting a lot lately with a lot of really micro-sized projects and I appreciate how emotionally substantial they almost always are, it’s the real magic touch that’s made me so attached to them as a creator. And now that I know how to add games to IGDB and therefore backloggd it’s over for you fuckers I’m adding them all bay bee.
Casting Hearts is a one-scene game where you step into the role of Marjoram, a student of indeterminate gender (and species) at some kind of magical university doing their gosh darn damndest to treat their girlfriend Ginger to a lovely birthday date, or at least the loveliest approximation of one Marjoram can muster via some spellcasting and a crystal ball skype call. It’s a short game and mechanics-light, with only a few aesthetic changes and branching paths via the frequent dialogue options, but I found some nice variation and flavor to explore across two playthroughs and two endings I saw in not quite an hour of playtime.
The game is as sweet as it looks, but anyone familiar with npckc’s work will know that while this isn’t a straight up melancholia like all things equal i would prefer it if we were safe & lonely instead of together & afraid but i cannot deny that it is hard; or: a solitary spacecraft, the treacly art style doesn’t mean the game won’t take its characters seriously or treat their problems respectfully and with import. this is a game about making the perfect mind palace cake for your girlfriend and giggling over the goofy whale that’s waving to you from the waters of the astral beach that your date overlooks, but it’s as much a game about the pressure Marjoram puts on themself to make that date perfect because everything else is so imperfect and this is the best they can do; about being angry at what the world has taken from us, in people, in time, in life experience; fear about how much longer this will go on and the certainty that we’re just not built for the kind of solitude a lot of us are forced into by necessity these days (or force ourselves into, if we must, which is harder, and gets harder every day).
But that’s not all there is either, I’m not just here like “broooo this CUTE game is actually KIND OF DARK” lol I’m not thirteen. These characters are people and they’re in a relationship and life is hard, right? They talk to each other, and there are multiple ways for things to break bad in this game that revolve around how forthcoming you the player are with Marjoram’s anxieties vs. the mask of Perfect Party Purveyor. At the end of the day though, regardless of how thoroughly feelings get hashed out or left a bit hanging by the end, these are people who are here for each other as much as they can be and that’s not nothing.
npckc is one of my favorite game creators working right now because they’re so good at balancing these tones. Their work does aim to please, of course, I mean like, look at it right? But it always comes tinged with a deft realism. There’s never a sense that things that are difficult or uncomfortable are being shied away from or deflected in the name of being cozy or wholesome. Instead these games insist that we can and must find comfort where we can get it within the hardship. It’s always going to be hard, and it’s always going to be worth it – not always in equal measure, but our loved ones are there to help up out when we need it, if we can find the strength to ask.
It's a balanced experience, one that in a very short amount of time encompasses two years’ worth of bad feelings and what we’ve made in the wreckage of them. npckc has been experimenting a lot lately with a lot of really micro-sized projects and I appreciate how emotionally substantial they almost always are, it’s the real magic touch that’s made me so attached to them as a creator. And now that I know how to add games to IGDB and therefore backloggd it’s over for you fuckers I’m adding them all bay bee.