Heartworm Review – When nostalgia alone just isn’t enough

Well, this came as a surprise. And not a pleasant one. As an older gamer and a fan of all things PlayStation 1, I jumped head-first into Heartworm with great expectations – especially since I’d enjoyed its playable demo quite a bit, and was hankering for more. The setup seemed perfect: an otherworldly descent into a world of memories, presented with intentionally blocky graphics reminiscent of the original Silent Hill or the very first Resident Evil – it had all the right ingredients to tell an emotional, memorable story that also happens to tickle your nostalgia bones. And while the game does more or less succeed on the visual front, its various elements and mechanics sadly never coalesce into a satisfying whole.

Intriguing first steps, but then…

Heartworm starts off fairly strong, taking its time to set up its story. Young Sam, having lost her grandfather, goes off to investigate a mysterious house that supposedly has a portal in its attic – a portal that could potentially allow Sam to see her grandfather again. Psst, spoilers: the house does have a portal in the attic. You step through it, and bam, you’re transported into a dreamscape seemingly woven together from snapshots of the past. Sounds intriguing, right? But here’s the thing: the game just… doesn’t really do anything with any of this. I feel like I’ve just played four and a half hours of nothing – I know it sounds harsh, but I wouldn’t be saying this if it wasn’t my 100% genuine impression of the game.

To me, it felt like the narrative never really went anywhere. You get a few journal entries about death, lost loved ones and various philosophical musings, accompanied by Sam’s poorly voice-acted inner monologues about her past, but other than that, you almost forget about the story altogether. There’s a painful lack of cohesion and focus – the game tries so hard to recreate set pieces from its primary inspirations (mostly Silent Hill and Resident Evil), that it forgets to have an identity of its own. And then it just ends, and I’m still not sure what the whole point of this entire journey was, or what it was even trying to say other than some really surface-level stuff. It all just felt extremely shallow and underdeveloped to me.

Say cheese

Heartworm doesn’t fare much better mechanically, either. Its combat system is essentially a simplified version of Fatal Frame’s Camera Obscura, with Sam having to aim her trusty camera at enemies and then take snapshots in order to damage them. The seamless transition from classic fixed camera angles to over-the-shoulder aiming is admittedly pretty cute, but the unimaginative enemy design and the sheer simplicity of the combat (you only have your camera, nothing else) makes this aspect of Heartworm just as bland and forgettable as the narrative. The handful of boss fights you get during the story are similarly disappointing and mostly boil down to, you guessed it, taking aim and shooting the monster until it dies. The final boss in particular is so ridiculously – and almost insultingly – simple in its mechanics that I audibly exclaimed “That’s it?!” when I beat it. What’s more, the game gives you ammo and healing items by the boatload, so if you were hoping for some classic survival horror-style resource management, I’ve got bad news for you. I’m pretty sure I had like a dozen medpacks by the end of the game and barely ever had to use any of them; the only time you’ll get hit is during the aforementioned boss fights, as the game’s primary enemies – slow, shambling ghosts made of white static – are generally too sluggish to pose any real threat.

Heartworm’s puzzles are fairly simple, and generally follow a certain trend. More specifically: once you find an item, it immediately becomes obvious where you need to use it. Imagine finding a door with a Texas-shaped keyhole, and then a few minutes later, you happen to chance upon a key with a Texas-shaped pattern. Wow, gee, I wonder where this item will come in handy. Hmm, let me think. Yeah. Aside from a few minor exceptions, this is how the majority of the game’s puzzles play out.

Runnin’ in circles

And yet, by far the most exasperating thing about the game has been its level design. And I don’t mean that in an aesthetic sense – the PlayStation 1 visuals are pretty nice, and one of the few good things about Heartworm. The levels, believe it or not, feel entirely too large, forcing the player to spend a good deal of their time just running through empty space. I kid you not, I actually had to switch to playing on my keyboard because holding down W was less tiring on my finger compared to having to constantly tilt my gamepad’s analogue stick forward. There’s so much running, man. So much running. It doesn’t help that the in-game map is preposterously unwieldy and confusing: there is no “you are here” indicator for the player, which resulted in me spending entirely too much time trying to make sense of where I was and which way I needed to go. I pretty much never have any issues with reading maps in survival horror games, but Heartworm somehow managed to fail even in this aspect.

Final thoughts

HeartwormPlatform: WindowsGenre: Action, AdventureDeveloper: Vincent AdinolfiPublisher: DreadXPRelease: 07/31/2025So no, I don’t recommend you play this game. If you do, you’ll probably just feel like you wasted your time. It doesn’t really do anything to make it stand out from the crowd, nor anything that wasn’t done better elsewhere (*cough, SIGNALIS, cough*). Don’t be fooled by its admittedly pretty snazzy retro aesthetic – it’s the only good thing the game has going for it.