Shivering Hearts
Shivering Hearts is a light-hearted role-playing game illustrated through detailed, hand-drawn watercolour paintings. Explore a world that reacts to your choices.
Developer
Publisher
Release
July 21, 2020
6 years and 12 days ago
Steam Reviews
Positive18 reviews94.4%
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Game contextLatest: IGF Team
| ContextThe evidence factors used to assess whether this game belongs on IndieGame.Fan. | Status | Notes Latest Contributor: IGF TeamEdit notes |
|---|---|---|
Updated: Jul 14, 2026Developer scaleThe operating scale of the game's developer. | ||
Updated: Jul 14, 2026Publisher scaleThe operating scale of the game's publisher. | ||
Updated: Jul 14, 2026Publisher statusHow the game's publishing relationship is classified. | ||
Updated: Jul 14, 2026Creative controlWho appears to retain creative control of the game. | ||
Updated: Jul 14, 2026Release statusWhether and how the game has been released. |
Media
7 itemsAbout the Game
Explore a unique fantasy setting with your childhood friend, Rin, and uncover what ills are plaguing the village of Shivering Hearts.
Become enraptured by a colourful cast of characters and experience beauty, heart-ache, romance, death, hope, nihilism, betrayal, regret, loss, and maybe even help someone on the verge of complete mental collapse.
Features
- Beautifully detailed, hand-drawn watercolour landscapes and characters.
- An emotionally gripping story that reacts to your choices.
- Meet a cast of 17 characters, each with their own personalities, goals and dreams.
- The game is a complex web of intricate dialogue choices and cascading consequences. Almost every choice has unique dialogue and outcomes.
- No combat or leveling. This might seem strange to put as a "feature", but I don't want to misrepresent the experience as a typical RPG, even though I would love to design such mechanics
Free Demo
Check out the free demo above for an exclusive ending! I believe demos are great for people to try out an experience and see if it resonates with them without committing to a price point.
Why I made this
Over the past 9 months, I created Shivering Hearts by myself with RPG Maker MV in my free time to show my artistic skills. I also wanted to create something that brings back the magic that I sorely miss from old school 1990s PC RPGs like Baldur's Gate 2, Fallout 1, 2, and Planescape; Torment. CLANNAD, Undertale, LISA: the Painful RPG, and Oneshot were also huge influences.
Role Playing Games can be so much more than combat, stats, character builds and optimal play (however, I still value these game design aspects very, very much). I wanted to challenge myself to see if I can still create an engaging experience that doesn't have combat or leveling mechanics, within a 1 month period. That turned into 10 months. I wanted to make a game with deep conversation trees, memorable characters and an emotionally touching story. RPG Maker MV allowed me to create and bug-test very intricate dialogue trees that match the quality and scale of those older titles but at the fraction of the development time and with plenty of polish. I hope that I have done those games justice.
