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Tuomo Laine’s “Border of her Heart” is a visual novel that’s been created in Visual Novel Maker and stars you as a border guard.

Well, one day when you’re working the morning shift, you are tasked with deciding who is allowed in and out of your city after a quarantine order is recently lifted.

Anyways, “Border of her Heart” reminds me somewhat of the old Commodore 64 game “Law Of The West”, and why is that? (so you might wonder).

You see, “Border of her Heart” expands on the “do something each day for several days and then it’s game over”, by allowing you to explore the city and surround areas, adding depth to the story in quite an interesting way.

Furthermore. After each day, your position is taken over by the night guard, and you report to your boss, where he gives a quick review of how well (or not) you’re doing.

There are quite a few people that you can come across that you can either allow or disallow joining your group, with your choices possibly making things better – or worse…

Because there is at least one person amongst the rabble you come across that doesn’t have your city’s best interest in mind as they go about their day.

So, what about the game’s characters then? Well, the characters that you meet both at work and in your spare time are diverse, and range from an officious ambassador to a precocious book writer (who may or may not be able to help your city).

That’s just the half of it though, because it’s also possible to become “intimate” with several people in the game (love is in the air!).

There is also something in “Border of her Heart” that is somewhat unusual for an indie game, and that would be the fact that all the characters (with the exception of the protagonist) are voiced – even the narration is!

The voice acting is, for the most part, pretty good, especially for the previous mentioned book writer.

The story itself is good too, and there are a handful of different options to choose from at times and with quite a few endings, although the penultimate scene does have a continuity error.

As for the game’s visuals. Well, whilst all the graphics are stock ones from VN Maker (but even so, they are very nicely drawn), they are used very well with simple mouth animations to go with the voice acting.

So, with decent graphics, story and whatnot, the only fly in the ointment is the actual engine used.

Why? Because Visual Novel Maker at the time of this game’s release had a memory allocation problem (which hopefully has been totally fixed by now)…

And as such, it takes a progressively longer time to move between scenes as you go through the game.

So this means very regular saving, exiting the program and then continuing from your save…Nevertheless, at the end of the day, “Border of her Heart” is still a very good, beautiful and interesting visual novel (the game is rather cheap as well).

In other words, if you’re into visual novel games (and if the game’s downsides don’t scare you away), then you might want to give “Border of her Heart” a fair chance.

Pros:

+ Interesting story.

+ Characters are voiced and are nicely detailed.

+ Music is appropriate.

+ Cheap.

+ Music and limited sound effects are nice.

+ Very attractive females.

Cons:

– It’s more of an engine problem than anything else, but scene changing is slow.

– Occasional bit of dodgy English and continuity problems.

Gameplay: 3/5

Graphics: 4/5

Sound and music: 3/5

Controls: 3/5

Replay value: 3/5

Story: 3/5

Verdict: 3/5

“Border of her Heart” offers a very nice and interesting story with decent backgrounds and characters (if they are stock ones). So it’s a real bummer that the Border of her Heart’s rather shaky engine is taking away from the overall gameplay experience.

Even so though, “Border of her Heart” is still very much a beautiful and very entertaining visual novel title. Furthermore, the price is just right as well. So “Border of her Heart” is most definitely worth picking up for sure.

Title: Border of her Heart

Developer: Tuomo Laine

Format: PC Download

Genre: Visual novel

Resolution: Program default

Release date: 2018-14-02

Difficulty: User-defined

Spent time: + 2 hours

Average grade internationally: N/A

PEGI age rating: N/A

Price: 0.79 Euros via Steam

Credit:

Robin Ek – Editor



Nicholas Kingsley

The Gaming Ground

Twitter: @sku_te

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Tags: Anime, Border of her Heart, Indie games, Lewd, PC games, PC review, Tuomo Laine, Visual novel