Know by heart
Childhood friends reunite after spending a long time apart, revisiting old memories and rekindling their friendship. However, something beyond their control will ruin this reunion.
Know by heart is a adventure, story rich and drama game
developed and published by Ice-Pick Lodge.
Released on February 10th 2022 is available only on Windows
in 2 languages: English and Russian.
It has received 758 reviews of which 676 were positive and 82 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.4 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 16.79€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Know by heart into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at Know by heart through various videos and screenshots.
Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS *: Windows 7 64-bit or higher
- Processor: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6300U CPU @ 2.5 GHz
- Memory: 4 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia Geforce gtx 560
- Storage: 3 GB available space
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
if depressions are haircuts ice-pick lodge is a hairdresser that only does extensions
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I've always had a deep connection to my hometown, a baseline for any nostalgic romantic artist like I claim to be. My fear was always that I'd lose myself if I ever left, like I'd be cutting a lifeline would make me forget all these special feelings I've compiled inside my heart, make me a different person completely. After quarantine, bottled up as we all were, I got myself a reason to leave; I moved a few hours downstate to a slightly bigger city, had a romance, had money, did adult things, and I felt wrong for it. I felt like I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but it was the right me. I returned, chasing nostalgia, remembering, feeling the same feelings I used to feel in new places and new ways. To be in Misha's shoes for a week, regarding the world like a hallmark nostalgia show, felt familiar. To stay in the same place all your life begins to feel like a haunt, like unfinished business is preventing you from leaving, but at some point the unfinished business is just... staying because you feel too attached to a place and love to see the minute changes year after year. The fear of forgetting, or missing out overwhelms the need for growth or change. That's not to say it's necessary to leave a place you feel comfort in, that it's the only way to grow as a person, but it's also scary to think about a place changing without you, the people you once knew becoming distant and different, the architecture itself shifting and changing like your own baby teeth falling out and growing back in and pushing the others around in the process. I hate to use the word, but when unprecedented things happen, what keeps you holding on to comfort? What keeps you the same person, is it simply stubborn will, or is nostalgia the binding agent that constitutes a soul and thus a self? Know By Heart is not an answer, but a simple scenario to consider. I struggle with these thoughts still, after thinking I've found myself, the right me this time, the right place and the right time. I don't know if I'll ever find an answer, maybe it's all just waves piling up to a high tide until the need for answers drowns altogether, and I'm carried away to wherever gravity wills me. I think I'm ok with that, but will it still be me after all?
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Although the story took place in a rather specific setting: a post-Soviet backwater [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_city]"closed town" in the mid-90s, which only bears minimal resemblance to the environment I grew up in. Nonetheless, I found the sentiments it conveys extremely relatable, under the present circumstances. No artistic work, so far, has done a better job of delivering this particular nostalgia - the nostalgia of the pre-2019 era - with such precision and accuracy. "A previous life, a previous incarnation."
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This game is akin to when Acid Wizard, the creators of the excellent survival-horror Darkwood, announced that their next game would be about Brazilian kids playing soccer. How the hell did we go from the hell-nightmare of the Pathologic games, the bizarre abstraction of The Void, to this? I have no idea. But I'm glad we got there, because this is great. Spoilers ahead. TL:DR is that this is an emotionally moving game, and while it is very short (4-6 hours), I think it's worth your time. Especially if you like narrative driven games like I do, such as Edith Finch or Kan Gao's works. Know By Heart shares some of the same conventions found in Pathologic, despite being visually and functionally a vastly different game. Some of the sections are set on a strict timer; the story is divided into days; there is a mysterious, almost sentient disease going around, removing peoples' memories. But whereas Pathologic is a dive into the futility of human existence and our inability to cope under pressure, Know By Heart is a game about the importance of remembrance and the inevitable loss of memory associated with aging (not necessarily disease-caused memory loss). The plague of Pathologic (especially 2) is a sentient, malevolent being with defined motives. It is aligned against the interests of humanity and seeks the destruction of the human race all together. Those who catch the Sand Pest die not long after they do. However, the "plague" (which is supposed a strain of the flu, as the game states) in Know By Heart is not much of an illness. None of the symptoms of this flu emerge in the physical body. There isn't any coughing, no weakness of the muscles, no sore throat, no pain. The only symptom of the illness is the loss of memory, mostly of the people closest to you. In some ways, the illness of Know By Heart is more horrible than the illness of Pathologic. In Pathologic, the suffering incurred by the disease is little more than a physical kind of suffering. Even in death, you still have yourself. But in Know By Heart you lose the memories, bit by bit, which have defined your life up until that point. And you watch as it slips through your fingers, much faster than science is able to develop a cure. And while in Pathologic you actively work to fight the disease as a doctor, in Know By Heart you don't have this ability. You are helpless as everything fades away around you. The game starts off innocent enough. You are a man named Misha, a run-of-the-mill kind of guy who works at the local railroad station, approving the passports of people coming and going. He has spent his whole life here. When we first meet him, he seems resigned to his place in the town. He imagines he will never leave. That is, of course, until he meets a familiar face: his old childhood friend, Asya. Here is where the game takes its first major turn. Now the game is no longer just about Misha and his boring life, but about the life he used to have, as a child, spending his days in bliss with his old gang of friends. And bit by bit the old gang comes back together, putting old memories together from photos they collect around town. For the first two hours of the game, it's like walking down someone else's memory lane. It's quite touching and is earnestly written. But this game is deceptive. It isn't really about Misha and his reunion with his friends, or even his blooming love for Asya whom he never confessed feelings for all those years ago. No, this game is about the loss of those memories. About watching everyone around you succumb to the disease, from Asya to Misha's parents to his friends to even the random people around town. But Misha remembers. He seems immune to the disease, able to recall everything that happened throughout his life as even those closest begin to forget. No one dies in this game. But some part of them certainly does. And watching that is a unique kind of awful that I never knew existed. By the end, everyone forgets their past life. Misha tries in vain to get them to remember, visiting them all and speaking to them, realizing again that there is no possible way he could get them to remember. He is alone, totally alone, in this new life of unfamiliarity. Suddenly this town, which once held all of his life's memories, holds no value. What is the worth of a memory that cannot be shared, which does not exist anywhere except for in your own head? Indeed, Misha's resolve at the start of the game to leave the town to begin a new life is fulfilled: he boards the train out of town, giving up everything he had built up in his hometown for somewhere new. Just not in the way he thought he would. IPL is quickly becoming one of my favorite indie developers. These guys know game design and story telling in games like no other. They have a unique touch when it comes to games that no one else seems to grasp like they do. Know By Heart, their most recent game, showcases the culmination of their knowledge of how to tell a video game narrative to the fullest of their ability. Seriously, these guys are good. Check out this game and the rest of their stuff. It isn't always for everyone. In these games you work for pretty much everything you do, and the choices you make are final. While short, Know By Heart is beautiful, hopelessly sentimental, and dedicated to the execution of its theme. It doesn't pull punches, it doesn't force a happy ending. Know By Heart is a great example of the way video games can tell stories in ways unique only to them, and I think everyone should give this game a go at some point. Besides, if more people buy this, they may actually finish the Bachelor and Changeling routes for P2 within the next decade! 8/10.
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 17 November 2024 22:20 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 19 January 2025 05:19 |
| Steam price | 23 January 2025 04:40 |
| Steam reviews | 22 January 2025 08:00 |
Online players
0
Developer
Ice-Pick Lodge
Publisher
Ice-Pick Lodge
Release
10 Feb 2022
Platforms