Summary
Pine Hearts is a cosy narrative adventure game that begins with a most simple quest: pet the dog. It’s easy, and yet incredibly satisfying, a theme that continues throughout the game.
Playing as Tyke, your sole goal is to explore this cosy world. Pine Hearts Caravan Park holds Tyke’s memories to unlock and tasks from the locals to help with. You’ll pitch in with cute and quirky quests, like rescuing a burger bun from a tree, in order to unlock tools and abilities to aid in your exploration. There are also more dogs to pet. So many more dogs.
These days, cosy games are becoming more popular as players embrace the desire to relax, chill out, and immerse themselves in a stress-free environment. Pine Hearts offers such an experience, although it’s mingled with memories that will tug at your heart strings.
Accessibility Comes First
When you load up the game, the very first thing that appears is a screen asking if you would like simplified control options, something Searra Leishman, Accessibility and UX Design Manager for Hyper Luminal Games, says is deliberate.
“That’s our kind of accessibility onboarding and [it] came directly from us talking to the community,” she explains. “So many games force you to go through a tutorial before you can get to the options menu and change the settings, which means that the first section of the game is not accessible. So we were really passionate about being able to choose settings right from the start.”
This splash screen only appears the first time you begin the game, but from the second you close it, the options menu is always accessible and contains a huge range of customisation options. It means that not only is the game offering accessibility from the start, but it’s also making you aware that it offers plenty of options.
“That was really important to me as a designer,” Leishman tells me. “Not just having that setting, but also communicating it in a way that would be easy to understand what was available and the impact changing the setting has.”
As someone who struggles with rapid button pushing, I know first hand the huge difference it can make just to be able to remove that option from a game. I’ve had to abandon games I enjoyed before due to not having fast enough reflexes. Sometimes I could get past a challenge, although it would require a lot of time and a large amount of frustration, but other times the speed required is physically beyond my capability.
Pine Hearts doesn’t just include this option however, it also contains settings to help improve the game experience for those with a range of disabilities. Some, like customisation of text size and font, you may expect, but Pine Hearts also includes a colour blocking option for those with visual impairments, something I’ve never seen in a game before.
This is where the background is saturated to tone it down and then important items are colour coded with bright colours to highlight the character, quest objectives, and items you can interact with. There are three different options for the colour grading to account for colour blindness as well.
Leishman explains how Pine Hearts aims to help those with anxiety and depression with its cosy, comforting, and light-hearted vibe. This made it especially important that the experience was available to as many people as possible.
Calling In Special Effect
Hyper Luminal decided to call in the experts and worked with Special Effect, a charity which helps those with physical disabilities access games. With their combined expertise, they put together a Pine Hearts specific accessible controller set up using Microsoft’s Xbox Adaptive Controller.
Seeing this at the Pine Hearts stand during Indie Gaming Showcase WASD brought a smile to so many faces. It’s rare to see anything beyond a keyboard and mouse or maybe the occasional gamepad at these kinds of events, and it was a joy to see so many smiles as those usually only able to watch others play could finally get their hands on a game.
The gameplay is just as satisfying as the array of accessibility options. Early in the game, you’re tasked with making a burger, a seemingly mundane task that quickly turns interesting. Ingredients are scattered around and you’ll need to search high and low for them – quite literally since one of them is up a tree – and gather them together. Cooking involves a quick minigame of ingredient stacking before everyone’s favourite trick: adding eight raw ingredients to a grill before closing the lid, waiting two seconds, then opening it to find a perfect burger. Simple, delicious, and Pine Hearts in a nutshell.
A perfect burger for a perfect cosy game, and it tastes that little bit sweeter knowing that everyone has a chance to be an instantly successful chef.
