Whether willingly or by way of societal pressure, that can wear away at someone’s soul over time. But it’s the job we signed up for, and it’s the job we’re being paid to do.įocusing on moments where it comes down to being creatively fulfilled or being lucrative, or even what is best for a community or what is best for you personally, Where the Heart Leads is about what it means to be beholden to others. Is it gratifying in the same way creating sculptures placed around the town is? No. So I had multiple moments throughout Where the Heart Leads where I was giving up my artistic license to serve a client who was paying me to do a particular job. We have clients here, and they don’t want us doing something beyond what they asked for the sake of our artistic integrity. No, we can’t embellish while rebuilding a gas station damaged in a storm. Much of dealing with Sege’s story is built on tempering his vision when we had a job to do for the city. As I was balancing home life, Sege was trying to vibe his way through a slump, falling back on his family when his artistic career wasn’t going well. emily is away For a Game About Imperfections, Chicory: A Colorful Tale Is Practically Perfect.Before Your Eyes is Built On Moments I Don’t Want to Blink and Miss.Even when a landlord proves to be an absolute bastard and evicts the family, they have land to move to and enough goodwill within the community to start a new business themselves. So our “everyman” is never without options. Whit’s father’s capitalist ideals come to fruition, and he has a prospering business by his son’s adult years. But in the background of Whit pulling himself up from his bootstraps is the knowledge that both he and Rene have safety nets in their parents. Jobs come and go, the stress of raising a family reaches its peak, and someone’s gotta rein in Uncle Sege and his use of scrap to create massive sculptures the children will no doubt climb on. But it’s the kind of mundane hardship every middle-class person goes through. Whit’s life, and the scenes we focus on in Where the Heart Leads, are full of hardship. Or at the very least, bring it down to the ground and explain how, despite his pure intentions, this is the way the world works. It manifests in ways such as when Sege would leave his father’s side when he asked for help during work, and it was my choice as Whit to support his free spirit, or attempt to crush it. Who will he marry? How will his life change when he has children? How can he convince his brother to stop viewing every job and project the two work on as part of their freelance construction business as a possible artistic endeavor? This is a man who’s gone through his entire life pushed by his father toward capitalist ideals, while his brother, much to the detriment of his early life, aspired to be an artist unbound by traditions their father attempted to force upon them. The points where we jump through the timeline of Whit’s life, from childhood onward, are all about big decisions. It’s a moment that stuck with me because Where the Heart Leads is a trip through various moments of its protagonist’s life and how capitalism has a chokehold on all of it. Whit makes up a few excuses before Kate, having heard her parents talking about making ends meet, and says she heard her mother say her father needed more work.Īfter having already occupied Whit’s life for a few hours at this point, there was something pure but tragic in the young Kate’s inability to distinguish between the act of doing something and the actual “work” that is having a job you do in exchange for money. Kate asks Whit if he can help them build a treehouse in a forest just off the side of their hometown of Carthage City. A few hours into Armature Studio’s narrative adventure game Where the Heart Leads, protagonist Whit Anderson is trying to wrangle his two kids Kate and Alex up from a playdate with their uncle Sege.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |