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Break up with everyone in Heartbreak High

By Amr (@siegarettes)

• Heartbreak High
  
• Developer- Good Bit, Alec Robbins
  
• Publisher- Good Bit
  
• PC (Steam, itch.io)
  

“You are dating every single student in the entire school.” 

That’s how Heartbreak High starts. That’s just how damn popular you are. And of course, having done that, that means it’s time to break up with every one of them. The only problem? You’ve got to do it by the end of school, and there’s only 40 minutes left. What follows is a madcap sprint through dialogue trees and surprise minigames, as you play an anti-dating sim in fast forward. 

It’s kind of wonderful.

What makes Heartbreak High work is that even as it broke the conventions of the genre, I could still sense its passion for dating sims. It reminded me in some ways of Half-Minute Hero. It plays around and sends up the format, turning the slow burn pacing into an arcade challenge. At the same time it manages to cram a lot of what makes the genre enjoyable into that short period of time. Heartbreak High is a very genuine game and it shows. 

There’s a surprising amount of care for the characters. There’s another version of this game that draws in caricature and asks you to be your cruelest self. But Heartbreak High forces you to balance your selfish desires and cruelty with a  kindness to each character. Each one of them plays with high school archetypes, but a lot of them gave me a real sense of personal history, and their dialogue gave me an idea of both what our relationship was like and who they were as people. That’s an impressive feat given that each of them only has a few minutes to talk to you. It’s a refreshing change after playing so many dating sims, where characters often repeat themselves to the point of redundance. It also keeps the pace brisk, since you’re constantly making choices and trying to find the right path.

On top of that you need to constantly balance a few attributes, so being to nice or too mean is a good way to tip the bar to max out one of those stats and immediately be failed. I’d originally intended to be as cruel as possible, but a few characters made it clear exactly how scummy that was, and made it easy to fail out unless I’d built up a little karma elsewhere. In a lot of cases there’s a way to resolve things peacefully, if not entirely amicably, and those became satisfying to puzzle out on return attempts, even if I’d already found another way to successfully break up with a character. There’s also a few trick options that result in some funny alternate paths.

In fact, it’s amazing that the comedy of Heartbreak High works so well. It manages to keep the gag going, and poke fun at every character, even my own, without ever feeling mean about it. If you’ve played a lot of comedy games you know that it occasionally means dealing with jokes that not only don’t land, but manage to leave a sour taste. Heartbreak High takes a lot of care to avoid those situations, and it gives it a real sense of compassion. It let me be really mean, but it never felt mean-spirited. 

As it draws towards the climax, it even gave me time to reflect on my choices, and asked me to really commit to what I was doing. There’s a finale that makes good use of music and surreal imagery to drive home the mood, and it does a good job of wrapping it up, tonally at least.

Heartbreak High  does falter. Aside from some repetition inherent in the format, what left me least satisfied was the limited amount of endings. There didn’t necessarily need to be more, but I wanted something that better reflected the small choices in the dialogue options, or at least a bit of an epilogue. 

That’s a small nitpick, though. For the size and scope it’s playing with, Heartbreak High manages to accomplish a lot. It constantly surprised me, and managed to take a gag and not only draw it out into a briskly paced, very replayable half hour, but managed to be genuinely funny, and at times tender and moving.

It’s ironic. For a game all about heartbreak, it ended with me falling in love.