The Wild At Heart is a gorgeous indie take on Pikmin that undermines its strengths with tedious mechanics.

The Wild At Heart is a game that I went into knowing only that I liked the graphical look and that it was “free” on Game Pass. From the short bit of the trailer I watched I thought it might be an adventure game, though I wasn’t sure. I soon found that it is sort of an adventure game, in that you walk through some gorgeously rendered 2D levels talking to people and solving puzzles, but it is really a Pikmin-like. You play a pair of kids, named Wake and Kirby, who find their way into the Deep Woods where they are tasked with saving this magical place and ultimately the world from a shadowy presence known as The Never. The game starts out with Wake in the normal world and gives some hints about his difficult home life before he packs up some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and runs away from home, intending to meet up with his best friend. He ends up entering a magical area called the Deep Wood and meeting an old man named Gray Coat who explains that the world is in danger and the guardians are losing their power yada yada yada.

It’s a fairly standard story and there are no real surprises along the way, although some of the characters and writing are above average, if a bit twee. I could follow what was happening and I responded to a few of the more emotional moments, but the story is sparsely told and not the big draw of the game. The visuals are something else entirely. This is a beautiful 2D game that looks halfway between an illustration from a children’s book and a Saturday morning cartoon. The animation is very basic, but the detailed characters and environments and beautiful use of color are really quite stunning. I wouldn’t say it has quite the impact of something like Ori and the Blind Forest, but it’s consistently pleasant to look at. The sound track is also nice, though not quite as notable.

Wild at Heart’s gameplay starts off like an adventure game, where you walk around, find objects for your inventory, interact with switches using a vacuum-like device Wake has built, and solve simple puzzles, but you soon gain little Pikmin like followers called Spritelings that you can throw, and they become your main means of interacting with the world. The Spritelings can fight enemies, weigh down switches, and as you progress you find other variants who can do things like burn away thorny bushes or break through crystal formations. The Spritelings follow you around like Pikmin and you can get more of them by breaking open large fruits to get seeds that you grow into new Spritelings, though you are capped as to how many can follow you at one time. The game quickly becomes about managing your Spriteling horde and using them to overcome enemies and obstacles, while occasionally helping out by kicking something, crafting items, or activating a switch with your vacuum.

At first this makes for a pleasant, if rather simple, adventure, but as the complexity grows the game struggles to keep up with what it’s asking you to do. The collision detection is a little wonky and this can be very frustrating. At one point I got stuck for hours and the solution ended up being something I’d actually tried already; throwing a fire Spriteling at some brambles to burn them, it just hadn’t worked because I must not have hit them exactly or something. It’s very easy to miss with the Spirtelings and while sometimes they will engage with whatever you wanted them to do, like fight an enemy or carry an item, often they’ll just stand still wherever you threw them until you collect them. It’s also very easy to accidentally throw too many Spritelings at an object (some of the later obstacles might require dozens to overcome, and I was up to 60 in my horde by the time I rolled credits) and have the remainder just stand in one place, sometimes obscured by a foreground object or whatever. You can even lose Spritelings within the horde, because if your character doesn’t touch them or suck them in with your vacuum after they somehow become detached from the group they will just stand there while the other Spritelings in the horde walk past and if you don’t notice in the moment you might suddenly find yourself missing a bunch. This is especially easy because they are 2D and many of them can occupy the same space, meaning that you might have 8 Spritelings all stacked on top of one another and if the top one is a white Ice Spriteling standing on a snowy background it’s very easy to miss them while you’re busy fighting or trying to solve a puzzle. You can also have Spritelings become detached if they bump into a hazard while you’re walking past even if you didn’t hit it yourself, or just fall in the water or get stuck on geometry due to bad pathing. I constantly struggled to keep them all corralled and while losing some isn’t a big deal because you can always hatch more, many obstacles require a particular number of specific types of Spritelings, meaning that if you had 15 fire Spritelings in your horde but 4 of them somehow got lost and you’re now at an object that needs 12 to carry, you’re going to have to trek all the way back to either get them from a base camp or find them somewhere on the level (though they do, thankfully, show on the map.)

These issues extend to other parts of the game and make it pretty tedious. There’s a relatively short day night cycle so you are constantly having to drop what you’re doing and make a bee line for camp because at night the Never’s agents manifest and attack you and your little helpers. Starting a puzzle only to have to redo several parts because Spritelings got lost or didn’t go where they were supposed to and then have to abandon the attempt because it gets too late in the day is not a lot of fun. It’s made especially unfun because enemies respawn, some every day and some every few days, and some other obstacles can reappear as well (or have to be overcome every time you want to pass them) meaning that there’s a lot of unnecessary and boring repetition. Also quite boring is the fact that many objects can only be carried by Spritelings, as they slowwwwly move back to a teleporter or other location so you can collect your prize, meaning that you spend a fair amount of the game either waiting for them to get where they’re going or babysitting them in mini escort missions if there are enemies in the way. In theory this could create tension with the ever present threat of night, but in practice it just incentivizes you to sleep before you start tackling a puzzle so you’ll have enough time to finish it and get the reward. A lot of this stuff is understandable given that this is a small indie team, but it all adds up and makes the game tedious in a way that it didn’t have to be.

And that’s a real shame because when The Wild At Heart isn’t tedious it’s quite pleasant. Nothing in it is mind-blowing, but the whimsical graphics are nice, the music is fine, the puzzles are engaging, the story is adequate to keep you wanting to move forward and see how it unfolds. It has all the makings of a solid indie title, and a fresh spin on a genre that doesn’t get a lot of entries. The shallow combat is forgivable, there are plenty of mechanics and the game does a decent job of handing out fresh ones as it progresses, and there are lots of secrets and hidden goodies that reward exploration and experimentation. When you’re walking around tossing Spritelings at obstacles to overcome them, doing some crafting to build new items and potions, and generally enjoying the game’s vibe it’s a decent time. But then you come across a puzzle you can’t solve only to find out that the first thing you tried was right it just didn’t work because of bad collision. Or you accidentally swing a little too close to an obstacle and kill some Spritelings you needed for your current task and have to go through a couple minutes of work to get your horde set up. Or you have to leave a task because night is falling and then have to start the whole thing over the next morning. There’s inventory management to deal with. Every night your Spriteling horde is dismissed and the next morning you have to set it back up, selecting the number of each type you want, and it doesn’t just default to your last set up or let you pre-set what you wanted, it has to be done manually. There’s just so much tedious busy work to do it wears on you.

I wanted to like The Wild At Heart a lot more than I did. I liked the aesthetics, thought the story was fine, and even enjoyed the gameplay, despite its simplicity. Ultimately the amount of tedium just wore on me and I put it down for a month before picking it back up and pushing through to the end. It’s not a bad game, and if you have more patience for the kind of tedious tasks described than I do you might really like it. It seems like it might be a decent game for kids, who have lots of time and would enjoy getting lost in its whimsical world and story that features fun, spunky, child protagonists, though some of the back story is a bit dark for pre-teens, involving death and dysfunction of parents. It’s a game I could see being significantly improved with some simple patches to increase default inventory space (you can upgrade it but it takes a lot of resources), extend the day-night cycle so it’s not so annoying, reduce enemy respawn rate, and let you pre-set your Spriteling load out so you don’t have to re-create it every morning. Obviously better collision detection and having Spritelings rejoin the horde whenever it rolls over them rather than forcing you to manually reacquire them would also be good. The underlying bones of the game are really solid.

I’m very impressed with what the small team put together. At around 15 hours it’s a lengthy adventure with way more mechanical depth than most indie games this size. The maps are well-made with lots of shortcuts to open and a lot of density in terms of things to see and do and find. If it sounds like your type of game you should check it out, especially if you have Game Pass, and I look forward to whatever this team does next. I just hope that they put their talents to something that’s a little more focused on their strengths and less on forcing the player to repeat the same basic actions over and over.