Pine Hearts review for PC, Nintendo Switch

Pine Hearts isn’t what you’d call hugely original. It’s a cute, cozy game about exploring the great outdoors and coming to terms with a big life event.

That broad description, of course, could also describe Lil Gator Game. And Haven Park. And A Short Hike. And…well, lots of other games, so you can see right off the bat that it’s not exactly exploring new territory. If you’ve ever played any of those games, you know what’s in store for you here: a bunch of tasks that seem like side quests that gradually help you unlock more and more of the map until you eventually don’t just unlock the whole thing, you reach some great emotional conclusion.

That, obviously, is a very cynical way of describing a game that’s pretty much the antithesis of cynicism. Pine Hearts wears its heart on its sleeve. Right off the bat, you know that you’re helping the main character, Tyke – an adorable round man/boy who runs around everywhere happily waving his arms – come to terms with the death of a loved one. Along the way, he doesn’t just recover old memories, he helps everyone and everything he comes across, whether it’s a sea captain who needs to make his boat seaworthy, a conductor whose band has disappeared, or a ghost that’s terrified of butterflies.

In other words, you’ve got to go into Pine Hearts with an inclination towards a lot of wholesomeness and a bit of whimsy.

I don’t want to make it sound like I disliked the game, because I didn’t. I had some issues with it, which I’ll get to shortly, but on the whole it’s fairly enjoyable. Tyke is pretty cute, and you definitely feel a sense of accomplishment as you open up more and more of the campgrounds on which the game takes place. Plus, of course, unless you’re the world’s biggest curmudgeon, you’re bound to have some kind of emotional response to the story, even if only a little.

But at the same time, there are little things that prevent Pine Hearts from being on par with the likes of A Short Hike or Lil Gator Game. For one thing, it has an annoyingly large map that you can only access from a pause menu, and that’s largely lacking in directional markers to help you find your way. What’s more, without any way to track your progress, you basically have to memorize where everything is and every quest you’ve been assigned, because the game doesn’t make it easy to remember any of it.

To some extent, this isn’t a huge issue since you’re constantly being asked to backtrack anyway to check out new areas as you unlock more abilities. If you miss something once, you’re sure to see it a second or third time. But on the flip side, it feels like a very artificial way to extend the length of the game – yes, new abilities like jumping and climbing are linked to uncovering memories, but there’s no way to travel across the map other than to walk back and forth down paths you’ll see lots of times, and that don’t look hugely different from each other within each distinct area. It feels distracting from the story the game is trying to tell.

And to be clear, it is a nice story. Pine Hearts is one of those rare wholesome, cozy games that doesn’t try to use an emotional overlay to hide gameplay that’s not very fun when you get down to it – it’s got an emotional core underneath a game that’s fun to play. But it picked up some bad habits from the genre’s lesser lights, and that prevents Pine Hearts from being one of the genre’s true highlights.

Little Nook provided us with a Pine Hearts PC code for review purposes.