Heartworm Grapples With the Trap of Nostalgia

Once she enters through the haunted house’s door, Heartworm takes Sam on a trip down memory lane. Old streets and homes she lived in, offices she worked at, hospitals she visited, and more make up the environment of horror the player must explore. Each area is stitched together in a dreamlike logic that doesn’t quite make sense. It resembles turning the page in a scrapbook. These are moments of Sam’s life captured in time and she is revisiting them. At every turn, Sam will comment upon how these places aren’t as she remembered them. This is the conundrum of memory versus record. 

Signs of physical record keeping are strewn about, like VHS tapes, notes, and photographs. They remind us that there has been some attempt by someone to preserve the moments and people around Sam. The fixed camera angles, a staple of retro-survival horror, only supports this reading by presenting the landscape as perfectly framed shots. Furthermore it brings into question if these landscapes themselves are more record than memory. It is possible that Sam’s memories of her past (both places and people) are more twisted than how the game’s environment presents itself to us. What happens when a person, in this case one dealing with grief and trauma, is confronted with a more accurate record of something that has been changed within their own memory?

Further nostalgia is found in the presentation of Heartworm itself. The journey Sam is going on is reflected in the retro stylings of the game’s homage to horror titles past. Games inspired by a bygone era of the medium have to deal with the same conundrum of memory versus record. You might remember the original Resident Evil one way only to return to the actual game and discover that your memory is wrong. This alone can spoil something for the player. The job of a retro-inspired title is to know what inspirations to take while also smoothing the edges in the same way our mind smoothes edges through memory. Heartworm accomplishes this with low-poly visuals prettier than an actual PS1 game and modern sensibilities like over the shoulder controls that don’t rely on the perceived finnickiness of tank controls (for the record this is a pro tank controls house, I just know not everyone agrees). The synergy between theme and presentation is one of Heartworm’s greatest strengths.

Over the course of Heartworm Sam has to confront how humans deal with mortality. There are notes and excerpts from books Sam can find that speak on the way art specifically can be used to preserve existence beyond death. Though for Sam, in the wake of her grandfather’s death, this leads to reflecting upon her own life and the worth that preserving it has. For Sam, it feels like a life filled with trauma and pain. At one point she comments on how it feels like happiness has slipped away and her life has passed her by. For this reason she constantly holds onto the idea of preserving the past rather than the present. Sam becomes the embodiment of superstitions around trapping souls in cameras or mirrors. She has trapped herself in recordings of the past due to a fear of what the future may bring. Though as the environments of the game make clear, preservation of the past is more of a trap that can perpetuate the pain Sam needs to escape.

The first thing you see in Heartworm is a clock ticking. This ticking recurs throughout the game. Despite efforts from Sam and other characters in the world, time ticks on. While grief plays a large part in why Sam particularly seeks to revisit and stay stuck in the past, Heartworm ultimately seeks to remind her and the player that acceptance is a vital step in moving on from any trauma. Preserving the past doesn’t have to be a trap, but that is only true for Sam if she learns to move forward into the future.

Willa Rowe is a queer games critic based in New York City whose writing has been featured in Digital Trends, Kotaku, Inverse, and more. She also hosts the Girl Mode podcast. When she isn’t talking games she can be found on Bluesky rooting for the New York Mets.