Amanda Walker | Through the Shattered Lens

What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed is an entrant in 2021 Interactive Fiction competition. Browse and experience all of the games by clicking here.

First, I need to warn you that there’s a SPOILER in this review. It’s not a huge spoiler but it might effect how you react to certain things that you discover while playing this game.

In What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed, you discover yourself in a large gothic mansion. You have no memories of how you came to be there. You also have a very limited set of actions available to you. This is because, and this is the SPOILER, you’re a ghost and you no longer know how to communicate with the world of the living. Fortunately, if you were smart enough to accept the game’s opening offer of “helpful information,” you’ll have a list of a few verbs that you can use to escape the room that you’ve found yourself in and explore the house. As you explore, you learn how to do things in your ghostly form, which in game terms means that you learn new verbs. You also start to remember the disturbing circumstances of what led to you becoming a ghost in the first place.

This is a long but rewarding game, a throwback to the type of Interactive Fiction that balanced solving puzzles with telling stories instead of favoring one over the other. The game’s unique command system takes some getting used to but it pays off. Fortunately, there’s not only a very helpful Hints system but there’s also a walk-through, in case you really get stuck. I got stuck but I always struggle with IF puzzles. This is a well-written and thought-provoking game and one of the best of the entrants that I’ve played. I highly recommend it.

Play What Heart Heard Of, Ghost Guessed.

(For those following at home, Lisa is attempting to clean out her DVR by watching and reviewing 38 films by the end of today!!!!! Will she make it? Keep following the site to find out!)

Poor Cecil Vyse.

The 1986 film A Room With A View is a love story. It’s about a young woman who meets a young man in Florence, Italy and then, upon returning to England, she discovers that the same young man and his father are now her neighbors. From the minutes they meet, it’s obvious that the young man and the young woman are destined to be together. The only thing that’s standing in their way is the strict culture of conformity of Edwardian England. That and the fact that the young woman is engaged to Cecil Vyse.

Cecil represents the establishment. He comes from a good family. He’s well-educated. He talks about the right subjects. He holds all the right opinions. He’s not an exciting man but he’s a good man who is destined to have successful but not very interesting life. From the minute that we meet him, we know that our heroine is not meant to stay with Cecil.

And it’s heart-breaking because the film goes out of its way to show that Cecil is not a bad person. In his own befuddled way, he’s one of the most likable people in the entire film. He may not have an interesting mind but he does have a good heart. When the moment comes that Cecil’s heart is broken, the film treats him with respect.

Of course, it helps that Cecil was played, in one of his first roles, by Daniel Day-Lewis. Day-Lewis plays the role with a quiet dignity. Instead of just turning Cecil into a mere nuisance that has to be pushed out of the way in the name of love, Day-Lewis emphasizes Cecil’s humanity. There’s a quiet scene where the recently heart-broken Cecil ties his shoes that is an example of truly great acting.

As for the two young lovers, Lucy Honeychurch is played by Helena Bonham Carter while George Emerson is played by Julian Sands. Both of them are achingly beautiful and, even more importantly, they both look as if they belong in Edward England and with each other. Still, seeing this film today, it takes a little while to adjust to seeing both Bonham Carter and Sands playing such … normal characters. We’re so used to seeing Helena killing people in Tim Burton movies that it’s nice to see her getting to rather sweetly fall in love for once.

The entire film is full of great British actors, all at their best. Denholm Elliott plays George’s father and gets to deliver a rousing defense of both true love and free thought. Maggie Smith plays Lucy’s overprotective aunt while Rosemary Leach is Lucy’s supportive mother. And then you’ve got Simon Callow as an eccentric vicar. (Because every British film needs an eccentric vicar.) Lucy’s younger brother is played by an actor named Rupert Graves and he’s so adorable that I kind of found myself wishing that he could have had a spin-off movie of his own.

A Room With A View is a wonderfully romantic film, one that I could easily see myself spending days just watching over and over again. A Room With A View was nominated for best picture but it lost to the far less romantic Platoon.