What could a throwback survival horror game with the title Heartworm possibly be about? The obvious answer is that the parasitic worm of that name made the jump from its natural host, the dog, to humans and that, perhaps, this causes erratic and dangerous behaviour. Maybe it would even have been artificially modified like in Resident evil. But no, there are no parasites in Heartworm. I think the developer, or perhaps the publisher, wanted to evoke something like an earworm for the heart and accidentally stumbled into a title which is unpleasant rather than intriguing.
The player’s character is a woman who is dealing with some deaths in the family. She finds stories online that tell of a house in the mountains with some connection to the afterlife. She naturally goes exploring. And her curiosity gets rewarded: she finds a Chess for beginners book. A really bad one, that doesn’t explain how capturing works, that remains silent on topics like castling or promoting, and that doesn’t even give the starting position.1
The book also mentions chess puzzles and it gives one example. This one example is set up on a nearby chessboard. It comes into perfect view, so the reconstruction is completely accurate:2
The task the player is set in this position is to find a mate in one. This task would be easy enough, were it not for the fact that the book says checkmate means “capture the king”. Of course, you can never capture the king, but even if that were allowed, white couldn’t do it in one move here.
Luckily, Bg5# is accepted as a solution to the problem. Or at least, performing that move on the board opens up a drawer under the chessboard containing an upgrade for your camera.3 Frankly, instead of this soulful tale that tugs on your heartstrings, I’d like to see the story of how and why someone makes a contraption that recognises the move made on the board and, based on that, unlocks a flimsy drawer with a not particularly expensive object in it.
Realism: 4/5 I can totally see this happen. You’ve been playing for hours and you’re exhausted and your mind is getting foggy, but your team needs another point and since you are an exchange up you keep plodding on but then your opponent attacked your knight on b5 and you wanted to recentralize it to d5 so you played Nc7 and now your opponent is waiting an excruciating amount of time before he delivers the checkmate and you want to go home but you want to stop existing even more. So, yeah, it’s quite realistic.
Probable winner: White. That’s sort of his prerogative in chess problems.
1. [Presumably, it’s really chess for beginners at checkers.] ↩
2. [Following the naming convention invented for this game, this applet is a diagramworm.] ↩
3. [Your camera is how you kill enemies in this game. Yes.] ↩