Pine Hearts

Most games about grief treat sadness as spectacle, with rain-soaked cutscenes, swelling strings and a final monologue built to make you cry. Pine Hearts does something harder. It makes grief feel ordinary. It shows loss as something you walk through, one familiar footpath at a time.

The game comes from Hyper Luminal Games, a Scottish studio, and is published by Secret Mode. You play as Tyke, who comes back to the Pine Hearts nature reserve, where he spent childhood holidays. His goal is to climb the mountain his late father never reached. That premise could easily have become maudlin. Instead the game uses it as a structural spine. Every beach, rockpool and caravan-park pitch Tyke revisits brings back a memory of his dad. The map works as a memory palace, and exploring it is how the story gets told.

The game launched on PC (Steam) and Nintendo Switch on May 23, 2024, and later came to iOS and Android. It’s a paid title at $12.99, with no microtransactions and no energy timers, which is the correct call for a game this tonally delicate.

In the market, Pine Hearts sits in the crowded “cozy” category next to titles like A Short Hike, and the comparison is unavoidable. The difference is intent. A Short Hike is about the joy of movement. Pine Hearts is about what a place remembers for you. Reception has been solid rather than breakout: a 4.5 out of 5 store rating from 98 ratings and a Metacritic score of 81 point to a quiet success with unusually consistent sentiment — people who finish it tend to love it.

• A Grief Narrative Told Through Place: Memories of Tyke’s father are tied to physical locations. Exploring moves the story forward, and the story gives exploration its meaning.
• Cairngorms-Inspired Connected World: One continuous map based on Scotland’s Cairngorms, taking in beaches, rockpools, caves, castle ruins, golf courses and a caravan park.
• Metroidvania-Lite Progression: You find equipment and abilities that open shortcuts and new areas, at your own pace and with no fail states pushing you along.
• Quirky Side Content: You judge vegetables, conduct an orchestra, help ghosts, rescue bees and tidy up campsites for a cast of odd locals.
• Petting (Dogs and Crabs): It’s a small touch that tells you a lot about the game’s priorities.
• Serious Accessibility Suite: Simplified controls, colour-blocking modes and full input remapping are unusually thorough for a studio this size.

The Gameplay Loop

On paper, Pine Hearts is a Metroidvania. You pick up a tool, remember a ledge or gap you couldn’t cross earlier, go back, and the map opens up. That loop has powered decades of games because the “oh, that’s what that was for” moment works on almost everyone.

Pine Hearts keeps the loop and removes the friction. There is no combat, no health bar and no punishment for wandering. The Metroidvania structure here is not a challenge system. It paces the story. Each new ability decides which memories you can reach and when, so the developers control the emotional arc without ever pushing you through a corridor. That’s a smart piece of design, and the most interesting thing the game does mechanically.

The cost is that the puzzles are very easy. Almost every obstacle can be solved at a glance, and experienced players will rarely stop to think. That’s a fair criticism of the design. Plenty of cozy games manage one or two puzzles that make you stop and think without adding stress. Pine Hearts almost never tries, and the middle section feels a bit flat because of it.

Side Quests and Tone

The side content keeps the game from turning into a sad walking simulator. Judging a vegetable competition, conducting an orchestra and helping ghosts finish their business are tonally brave choices in a story about a dead parent. They work because they reflect how grief actually behaves. Life keeps being absurd around you, and a holiday park is full of people with their own small, silly problems.

The writing understands this. The locals are written as colourful rather than as joke dispensers, and the campsite clean-ups quietly suggest stewardship: looking after a place someone you loved looked after first. Most of these errands are mechanically thin, usually a fetch or a short interaction. They’re there for texture, not depth, and anyone wanting chewy optional content will finish them quickly.

Narrative Delivery

This is where Pine Hearts earns its reputation. The memories of Tyke’s father arrive in small doses tied to places, never as long exposition. You come across a spot, and the game tells you, with some restraint, what happened there years ago. It trusts players to fill in the gaps.

That restraint matters. Games about loss often over-explain, as if afraid the player won’t feel enough. Pine Hearts assumes you will. The emotional payoff builds up gradually instead of arriving through a single scripted tearjerker, and the design makes it easy to see why the story lands for so many. The climb up the mountain, the goal from the first scene, is a destination whose meaning shifts as you approach it.

Length and Pacing

It’s a short game. Most players will see the credits in one or two relaxed weekends, and completionists won’t find much extra. The length isn’t a flaw on its own terms, because a story like this would wear out if padded. It does matter for value, especially for players who judge cost per hour, and $12.99 is a reasonable ask for what’s here.

Onboarding

Onboarding friction is close to zero. Controls are simple, the objective (climb the mountain) is clear from the start, and the connected map means you rarely lose track of where you are. This makes it an excellent game for non-gamers and a good one to play alongside a child.

The low-poly art is clean, saturated and warm. It doesn’t imitate Scottish weather so much as remember a Scottish holiday: brighter and kinder than the real thing, which fits a game about memory. Environments are easy to tell apart. Rockpools, pine forest, ruins and caravan park each have their own palette, which helps with navigation on a connected map.

The UI stays out of the way, with minimal HUD and readable text. Because the geometry is modest, the game is light on hardware by design, and the style holds up well on smaller screens. The colour-blocking accessibility mode deserves specific mention: it shows the studio thought about readability beyond the default look, which is rare for the genre.

For a game that asks nothing of your reflexes, occasional frame dips on lower-end devices wouldn’t matter much anyway.

• Steam (PC): The reference version. Full input remapping works with both keyboard/mouse and a controller, though a gamepad suits the pace better.
• Nintendo Switch: Arguably the natural home for Pine Hearts. Handheld play fits its short, calm sessions, and the low-poly art suits the smaller screen. Resolution is lower than on PC, but the art style is built to hide that.
• iOS: The platform where the touch controls make the most sense. The game never asks for precision, so direct input works, though controller support is still worth using if you have one.
• Android: The modest visuals leave plenty of headroom on mid-range phones, though results will naturally vary across the fragmented Android hardware market.

Pine Hearts won’t change the genre, and it doesn’t try to. Its Metroidvania structure is borrowed, its puzzles are barely puzzles, and its length leaves you wanting more. Those criticisms are real, and players who want a challenge should skip it.

What it does well, though, it does with more care than most. It takes an overused subject and handles it with restraint, humour and respect. It turns a map into a memory and a climb into a eulogy, and it does so without ever raising its voice. Add a thoughtful accessibility suite and fair pricing, and you have a sincere small game that’s easy to recommend to anyone who wants a story-first few weekends. If a story about a father, a mountain and a map sounds like your kind of thing, the rest of the climb is worth it.