Heileen

Adventure games are usually packed with puzzles and various other riddles that require you to think and spend a lot of time figuring out how to push the story forward. However challenging and fun this might be, the younger audience may not appreciate the task too much and could very easily give up way too soon, thus missing out on the entire plot and everything it brings with it.

Heileen is an adventure game that allows practically anyone to hear the story from start to finish, regardless of what choices you make along the way. Moreover, depending on the number of points you manage to gather until the end, the plot can end in multiple ways, which means that you can replay the game and try to find out the rest of the endings as well, in case you are curious what happens when your decisions fluctuate and shift entirely.

As the name clearly suggests, you play the role of Heileen, an eighteen year-old teenage girl who goes on a trip around the world in a ship full of sailors. She is also joined by her uncle, the one who came up with the idea for the trip, as well as a very close friend of hers by the name of Marie. Along the way, Heileen falls in love with another sailor, although the plot turns into a very crude and boring soap opera about five minutes in and it becomes quite painful to follow from then on.

As previously mentioned, the game is very simple to play, maybe even too simple to be called a game in the true sense of the word. Interactive novel would be more appropriate, since you just have to click in order to see more and more lines of bad dialogue, as well as watch the characters change scenery from time to time. The few options you get to make do affect the way others see you, but it would be very difficult to end up with no points at all at the end of the story anyway.

Visually, the hand-drawn environments and characters do look pretty well, especially if you are familiar with the anime style and you are not bothered by the big eyes and the gravity-defying haircuts. There is no spoken dialogue and the background music becomes repetitive and annoying pretty quickly, which means that you either have to stop playing every once in a while, or mute it entirely.

In the end, Heileen does not really manage to captivate the attention of an adult for more than five minutes, mainly due to the childish plot, the simple characters and the lack of intrigue. However, the younger audience might find it rather charming, especially if the ridiculous plot sits well with them.