Still Heroes

I keep thinking about the piano sequence near the start of Still Heroes. You press the keys yourself, the notes ring out, and before you have time to read a single instruction you already understand the language this work is going to speak to you in. That is the whole philosophy of Brussels-based artist exaheva condensed into thirty seconds: teach through feeling, not tutorial text. It is a small, confident miracle that this approach holds for the entire hour or so the piece takes to read. Still Heroes sits in a category that has very few honest occupants: the interactive comic that actually needs to be interactive. There are no branching paths, no consequence trees, no choices in the visual-novel sense. What you get instead are small acts of participation woven into the panels themselves. You click to advance a daily routine, you physically build the habits Emeline builds, and at certain moments the comic takes those habits away from you to make an emotional point that straight prose could not land as cleanly. A Steam reviewer put it well when they noted the interactions feel meaningful "in ways I can't explain" without spoiling the story, and that tracks. The craft is in the reveal, not the mechanic. The hand-drawn art is doing heavy lifting throughout. exaheva drew everything herself, and the style has the warm, slightly imprecise quality of a sketchbook that has been loved to pieces. Environments shift from cramped apartment interiors to open fields, and the change in visual breathing room mirrors Emeline's own emotional arc with precision that feels intentional rather than accidental. The soundscape is mostly silence, which the developer flags upfront on the store page, and it is the right call. When sound does arrive, it lands with disproportionate weight precisely because the space around it has been so carefully kept empty. A handful of players found the silence excessive; I think those players wanted a different work. The story itself is disarmingly small in scope. Emeline's superhero group disbands. She is left holding the dream alone. What follows is not a dramatic confrontation or a heroic redemption arc but something quieter: a slow renegotiation with daily life, friendship, and a character named Mariam who arrives in ways some readers found convenient. The criticism is fair to a point. Still Heroes does not have the narrative density of a three-hundred-page graphic novel. But exaheva has spoken about deliberately inverting the superhero structure, starting with action and winding down toward stillness, and that structural choice reads as a feature rather than a flaw once you sit with the ending for a few minutes. The title itself carries three meanings simultaneously, and none of them feel forced. This is a one-person project that began around 2014, stalled for years when funding ran out, survived on a single grant, and landed on Steam in 2022 holding an 89 percent positive rating from people who found it. It is not a game in any mechanical sense. If you need systems, builds, or replayability, look elsewhere. If you have an hour, a quiet room, and some patience for a story that resolves gently rather than loudly, Still Heroes knows exactly when to end.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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