Know by Heart is an adventure game developed and published by Ice-Pick Lodge. The game has a great concept involving the way memories fade over time, but it's wasted on a story that is mired in tedium and long sessions of boring narration.
Know by Heart is set in a provincial Russian town in the years after the fall of the Soviet Union. The main character is Mikhail, known as "Misha" by his friends. Misha spends his days working a dead-end job at a train station, thinking fondly back to the days of his youth, and the time he spent with his friends, who have all left town and gone on to better things. His friends all return for a reunion and Misha gets the chance to reconnect with Asya, the girl he loved in his youth. The reunion is interrupted, however, by a strange event that threatens to take away the thing that Misha holds most dear.
The gameplay in Know by Heart is similar to that of a point-and-click adventure game, though the focus is more on exploration than puzzle-solving. Know by Heart gives the player a free run of the town and they're able to explore throughout the story. The aim of Know by Heart is to learn the history of its characters and town, with a few basic minigames and set pieces spread throughout the runtime.
The biggest issue with Know by Heart is that its story is more tell than show. The bulk of the game involves dry narration from characters reminiscing about their very ordinary childhoods. It's difficult to talk about the big twist without spoiling the story, but it has all kinds of interesting possibilities for storytelling that are never utilized. The majority of Know by Heart's runtime is just characters talking in front of static images or standing in ordinary environments. Know by Heart also does nothing interesting with its setting, to the point where it could easily be set in the contemporary United States of America or Great Britain, without any significant changes.
The visuals in Know by Heart are basic and functional, with the main gimmick being that the character models don't have faces. A similar gimmick was used in Dreamscaper, with characters having a mannequin-like feel to their appearance. This gimmick does fit the premise of Know by Heart and it's one of the more memorable aspects of its design. The soundtrack in Know by Heart is one of the best aspects of the game, with its constant piano riff picking up and slowing down to match the action. The quality of the voice acting is more of a mixed bag, which isn't a good sign for a game with so much dialogue.
In terms of gameplay, Know by Heart loves its shape-matching puzzle minigames. A big part of the game involves matching photo pieces or parts of a broken map, which is what makes up most of its gameplay. The exploration of the town would have been improved by making it smaller or introducing fast travel points, as the movement speed of the main character feels painfully slow, with chunks of the game involving running backward and forward through the same environments. Know by Heart only takes around four hours to finish a standard playthrough, with a few more hours added on to find all the optional scenes and map pieces, and it feels like the exploration and some of the minigames were only added to pad out the runtime.
Know by Heart features a meticulously crafted story, and its feeling of nostalgia comes from a genuine place, but it doesn't sell its narrative in an entertaining way. Know by Heart involves a character being given a reprieve from their boring job to relive happier times with their friends, but they have only passed their boredom onto the player.
Know by Heart is available now for PC, PS4, and Xbox One, with a Nintendo Switch version arriving in the future. Screen Rant was provided with a digital code for the PC version of the game for the purposes of this review.