Shivering Hearts

I keep coming back to a specific kind of game: the kind one person made in their spare time, on a kitchen table, with a lamp and a glass surface serving as a makeshift light-box. That handcraft is exactly what Shivering Hearts wears on its sleeve, and whether it connects with you will depend almost entirely on whether you can meet that sincerity halfway. The game strips the RPG format down to its conversational skeleton. No combat, no levelling, no inventory. What you get instead is a dense web of dialogue choices and cascading consequences, built in RPG Maker MV but illustrated with actual hand-drawn watercolour paintings. The developer, Mischa, would draft a scene layout in-engine, print it, then paint over it by hand before importing the result back in. Every environment you walk through carries that particular softness, the bleed of pigment at the edges, the warmth of paper grain. It is genuinely unlike anything else sitting in the RPG Maker catalogue. The story follows you and your childhood friend Rin into the village of Shivering Hearts, where something is quietly wrong. The cast runs to seventeen characters, each carrying their own goals and anxieties. Rin herself is a standout: sardonic, existentially restless, and written with a lightness that keeps even the heavier moments from caving in on themselves. The game asks real questions through its dialogue, about empathy, about whether extending it to someone undeserving costs you something, about dreams and what we project onto them. That this ambition fits into a two-to-four hour runtime is the clearest sign the developer understood what shape the story needed to be. Over 120 ending combinations across that modest runtime means replay has genuine texture, not just cosmetic variation. The honest caveats: this is an RPG Maker game and it moves and feels like one. Players who bounce off the engine's default pace or expect the production values of a funded studio will bounce here too. The absence of a score, noted by the developer himself as a regret, does leave some scenes feeling slightly underlit emotionally. And because the choice consequences are often deliberately hidden, your first run may end with you unsure whether your decisions mattered at all. They did. That uncertainty is the point. A free demo exists with its own exclusive content, which is a generous and honest way to let someone test the frequency before committing. Shivering Hearts is the kind of game that was made to reach one person at a specific moment in their life. You may or may not be that person. But the craft involved in trying, from the painted landscapes to the carefully structured dialogue trees drawn from the lineage of Planescape: Torment and Undertale alike, deserves more attention than the game's quiet corner of Steam has given it.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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