I recently had a chance to check out the beta build of Heartspell: Horizon Academy, an upcoming game that combines a romance visual novel with match-3 puzzle gameplay. You play a new student at Horizon Academy, a school for learning magic. The headmaster has vanished, but the students are holding things together in his absence. Now you’re free to learn magic and get to know your fellow students at the same time.
Casting magic comes in the form of match-3 puzzles. The match-3 gameplay at its core is pretty typical. Swap two adjacent tiles to match three or more, and they disappear from the board and grant you points. You need a certain amount of points to win, and you have a limited number of turns in which to get them. As you interact with different characters, you’ll learn a number of spells you can equip for use in these puzzles. For example, one spell lets you clear two chaos gems–dangerous gems that reduce your points if you match them–while another lets you move an entire row one space to the left. The more you build your relationships, the more powerful spells you’ll learn.
There are 11 characters with whom you can build relationships, ranging from a siren curious about your efforts to resist her compulsion to a human who accidentally transformed himself partly into a monster. The main character is essentially a blank slate, so they have no actual dialogue of their own. All of the main character’s dialogue comes in the form of choices, even when there’s only a single choice to pick. Choice icons warn you if an option will lead to romantic content, making it easy for you to determine if your interactions with them will be platonic or romantic. Every character’s route can be completed regardless of which direction you pick, and an early story dialogue establishes that romantic exclusivity isn’t expected.
To spend time with a character, you select them from the map. This will show you the next scene of their story and give you a match-3 puzzle to play. This adds an additional twist to the gameplay because each character has a unique mechanic. If it’s a scene with Typhon, who loves combat, he’ll add dangerous gems on a timer that you need to clear within a certain number of turns. If it’s a scene with Amara, who isn’t easily impressed, only matches of four or more add points to your total. Every character has a unique gimmick, and that keeps the puzzles from feeling too repetitive. Completing match-3 puzzles gives you XP, which you can spend to help you with the puzzles, such as increasing the points you get from a specific element or gaining additional turns. You still get XP even if you fail, which is convenient. However, since I ended the game with an excessive amount of leftover XP, I’m not sure if that was intentional or if it will be changed in the final version, especially since you can also play additional practice rounds for more XP once you’ve finished a character’s story.
Each character’s route has ten scenes, and you finish their story after seeing them all. If you’ve pursued romantic options with them, you get a special CG of the character at the end. While that’s nice, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get to see an actual date scene. The one downside to every route being completable regardless of your romantic choices is that the romance isn’t ever a core part of the route, so someone looking at Heartspell as an outright romance game might find the romantic content lacking. However, once you complete a route, the character remains available for a number of bonus scenes, which sometimes contain their own options, so that balanced out my disappointment by letting me get a few more romance scenes with my chosen characters.
In addition to the romantic and platonic options, there are sometimes minor branching paths within a route. One character’s story gave me a choice of another character to ask for help, and I was delighted when the person I chose showed up in the next scene. Two characters expressed interest in each other, and I encouraged them to go on a date, which they later referenced. While there’s already a substantial amount of content just to complete the main story, little details like that suggest it will have a fair bit of replay value to see different variations, even if the core events remain the same.
The beta has some unvoiced sections, but the final game will be fully voiced, including the narration. There were a couple of additional oddities, I assume, because of it being a beta, such as each dialogue box being labeled with its node number. Aside from that, the main flaw that stood out to me is a side effect of how character availability is handled. Available characters are random; in fact, you can reload from the title screen to change who’s available. As a result, if your progress on one character falls behind the rest, which happened to me due to a character who was locked behind progression of a different route, you might find yourself with nothing but bonus scenes to watch as you wait for them to appear. Bonus scenes can also be repeated, which is great if you want to see different outcomes but frustrating once you’ve seen most of the content. By the end, I found myself reloading repeatedly until I got lucky enough to spawn the last few bonus scenes I was missing.
Heartspell: Horizon Academy Blends Visual Novel Charm with Spellbinding Match-3 Battles
Overall, Heartspell: Horizon Academy has a lot to offer, and the structure makes it easy to get engrossed. While the focus is not on romance so much as relationship-building in general, it’s great if you want to get to know different characters. If that’s all you’re interested in, there’s even an easy mode that removes the match-3 puzzle gameplay so you can enjoy it purely as a visual novel, but if you do like the gameplay, you’ve got a harder difficulty option and the practice mode to keep yourself entertained. It’s an interesting blend of genres, and my time with the beta has me feeling optimistic about its full release.
