Shivering Hearts

Explore a unique fantasy setting with your childhood friend, Rin, and uncover what ills are plaguing the village of Shivering Hearts.

Become enraptured by a colourful cast of characters and experience beauty, heart-ache, romance, death, hope, nihilism, betrayal, regret, loss, and maybe even help someone on the verge of complete mental collapse.

Features

• Beautifully detailed, hand-drawn watercolour landscapes and characters.

• An emotionally gripping story that reacts to your choices.

• Meet a cast of 17 characters, each with their own personalities, goals and dreams.

• The game is a complex web of intricate dialogue choices and cascading consequences. Almost every choice has unique dialogue and outcomes.

• No combat or leveling. This might seem strange to put as a "feature", but I don't want to misrepresent the experience as a typical RPG, even though I would love to design such mechanics

Free Demo

Check out the free demo above for an exclusive ending! I believe demos are great for people to try out an experience and see if it resonates with them without committing to a price point.

Why I made this

Over the past 9 months, I created Shivering Hearts by myself with RPG Maker MV in my free time to show my artistic skills. I also wanted to create something that brings back the magic that I sorely miss from old school 1990s PC RPGs like Baldur's Gate 2, Fallout 1, 2, and Planescape; Torment. CLANNAD, Undertale, LISA: the Painful RPG, and Oneshot were also huge influences.

Role Playing Games can be so much more than combat, stats, character builds and optimal play (however, I still value these game design aspects very, very much). I wanted to challenge myself to see if I can still create an engaging experience that doesn't have combat or leveling mechanics, within a 1 month period. That turned into 10 months. I wanted to make a game with deep conversation trees, memorable characters and an emotionally touching story. RPG Maker MV allowed me to create and bug-test very intricate dialogue trees that match the quality and scale of those older titles but at the fraction of the development time and with plenty of polish. I hope that I have done those games justice.