A play is about to begin in the city of Gris. It is a tragedy where the supernatural makes itself manifest. A pair of mysterious twins starts telling a story, but then a man named Alexis chooses to steal the show.

Alexis is a leading man that also acts as a casting director, gathering troubled people to act in a different kind of story. Cathrine, a nun looking for happiness that gets dragged into religious horror. Michael, a closeted bisexual facing the supernatural and the mob. Arthur, an archaeologist settling into a new role and finding himself. Anne, a college student that feels trapped by expectations. Together, they will…

…Um… I honestly don’t know.

Frail Hearts Versicorae Domlion is a 2022 game by Sezhes, a horror themed RPG with interconnected stories. You choose a character and play through part of their story. When that wraps up, you could play on or witness the antics of another character with Alexis. See everyone’s stories through, and maybe you’ll see to the end of the little play.

Let’s start things off with Frail Hearts’ strongest aspect: its aesthetics! Frail Hearts has a strong monochrome art style with splashes of color to add a little liveliness. Beyond establishing a horror atmosphere, the monochrome stylings lend the setting a sense of dreariness. Gris is a city standing in the aftermath of a war with an active criminal underworld, and the art style makes Gris out to be a miserable place. As for the supernatural, the monsters have pretty great sprites. If you’re going to make a horror RPG, the monsters gotta look fucked up, and Frail Hearts delivers.

Frail Hearts also has a strong soundtrack offering, created by the band Undreamed, a fantasy folk band. They provide the game with pretty fitting atmospheric music that I thought was nice to listen to. I checked out some of their other stuff, and while it personally isn’t stuff I’d go out of my way to listen to, I think it’s good stuff.

But with the talk of aesthetics out of the way, how’s the story of the game?

Out of the individual storylines, the best story has to be Michael’s. He has a more direct line to Alexis and has a stronger awareness of the supernatural that he actively tries to investigate. He fucked the girlfriend of a local mob boss that transformed into a werewolf to kill him. Michael’s close friend got killed by the werewolf, and as Michael investigates the whole werewolf incident, he also investigates the feelings he had for his friend. Michael’s story has more of an emotional weight than the others, and with him actively dealing with the supernatural and the mob, his story’s just the most engaging.

Cathrine though is easily second-best. Maybe some things in her story are predictable, but it’s a complete story about her and her own circumstances that doesn’t rely too much on the outer story. It’s a very straight-laced horror, but with the outer story being honestly kinda confusing, I respect it being to the point. Cathrine is very active in engaging with her horrors, which falls in line with her goal of finding a freeing future.

Anne in the meantime doesn’t face any grand problems, but is just fighting herself. In dealing with the stresses of school, the expectations of her family, and her unhappiness with herself, her troubles manifest in a dream world where she fights her personal horrors. Anne’s story feels like it’s in the wheelhouse of more typical RPG horrors and… it just kinda ends? She decides to just relax a little and move on and it just feels really anticlimactic, especially when she considers dating a guy that’s honestly just kinda annoying and doesn’t offer good chemistry. Good for her, I guess?

As for Arthur, it feels like his story is dedicated more to setting up things for the outer story than just being about him. One of the things stated about his story is that it’s a story that deals with a “society blinded by malice and prejudice,” but… it really doesn’t feel that way? Besides Anne assuming that he’s a janitor, Arthur faces no prejudice until the actual last part of his arc. When Cathrine visits him, she assures him that he’ll face no prejudice at her church, but again, he doesn’t face racism until the last part of his story.

His colleague is implied to deal with racism as a Chinese woman, but it’s not made explicit until, again, that last part. It extremely feels like Frail Hearts forgot the whole “society blinded by malice and prejudice” thing until the end of Arthur’s story, in which case they just end up speedrunning the whole thing. Also, gotta say, nice that the game cuts off a guy from saying the n-word, but that’s balanced out by letting him say the anti-Chinese slur and writing it out. It’s weird man.

On the subject of Arthur running into other characters, let’s talk about character interactions! For the most part, characters are just kinda passing by each other? “Thanks for the key I need to progress the plot, weird dreams we’re having, huh? Bye,” is how I’d summarize most of the interactions. Cathrine and Michael tend to lead the more in-depth conversations, and in fact, they’re the only playable characters that actually have something of a proper relationship.

And on that note, I kinda came to a realization while writing this: this game could have just been about Cathrine, Michael and Alexis. They’re the most active participants in the story, and with the true ending in mind, they have the most complete stories. Arthur helps set up the backstory, sure, but he just feels like a really incidental part of it. Something in Anne’s story comes out in the last arc, but beyond that and supplying Cathrine with something, she really doesn’t factor into the main story either. Besides being used in battles, Arthur and Anne just feel like they’re There.

But hey, let’s finally talk about those battles! Frail Hearts is turn-based RPG fare, but it doesn’t go too deep into the RPG experience. All fights are required stuff and there’s no grinding at all, unless you wanna reload another save to choose someone else’s story to level up a character so they have improved skills for a fight. I played on the game’s balanced difficulty, and I say that Frail Hearts walks a nice line between being too easy and too hard, with characters having set movesets that’s easy to get a grasp on. There’s a store where you can buy some equipment and items, and being able to buy stuff that heals health is actually pretty useful for Cathrine’s fights, since she’s the resident white mage but is inaccessible on her route.

On that note! An unusual quirk is that the character whose route you’re on isn’t playable in any fights that show up. Instead, Alexis takes their place. The other party members are present… somehow. My kinda read is that Alexis is sort of borrowing the spirits of the other characters to assist him in defending his current charge.

When you finish a character segment, that character gets a small upgrade and if a monster was killed during the chapter, that character acquires sins. Before you choose a character to run, you can invest a character’s sins to improve their skills and stats. It’s unusual that you improve a character by not properly playing as them, but it makes sense in the context of the story: playing a character’s route improves their spirit, and the character’s spirit is really what’s doing all the fighting. Why can’t their own spirit deal with the horrors? Uhhhh, I don’t know.

Get through all the horrors and you get one final story where the characters are all properly together and aren’t just figments Alexis dragged in. The final story of Alexis and the twins are dragged to the forefront to tie everything together, and…

I’ll be honest, I’m not sure how everything ties together? Except for Arthur’s backstory set-up, I don’t see how the other characters really factor into the machinations of Alexis and the twins. Maybe it’s a Live A Live thing of everybody being brought together by the connective thread of being haunted by The Creatures and feeling troubled, but while some of those horrors were definitely symbolic, there were definitely ones that were real threats like the stuff faced in Cathrine’s story.

Even then, why exactly did Alexis need to gather this troupe of actors? Because they were capable of farming sins to get stronger to fight the greater horrors at the end because of their troubled lives? I mean, I’d get it if that’s the answer, but it’s also an incredibly boring answer.

As for the endings you’ve fought so hard for, well, I was actually kinda underwhelmed. Fair, I got the bad ending first. I wasn’t prepared to start a new game plus, so I watched someone play through that. Now, there are definitely neat ideas on the good ending route, especially with how it shines a light on a character that acts suspiciously, but the actual ending itself… is also still kinda underwhelming because it doesn’t feel properly built up to. And really, that’s in line with my general opinion of the game.

The art’s there, the music is there, the gameplay is pretty okay, but the story is… just kinda disappointing. Frail Hearts definitely has a strong first impression, but playing on, I was just kinda “ehhh” on the whole thing. Again, the only stories that I felt satisfied with were Cathrine’s and Michael’s. Arthur and Anne needed more baking, because they just felt kinda There in the grand scheme of things. There are definitely some interesting ideas in this game, but in the end, it just doesn’t pull everything together.