Else Heart.Break() is a coding game released by a Swedish team - or singular person, I'm not quite sure. Regardless, it being Swedish lends to its faculties greatly. The game drips with Northern influence, being a slightly autistic and abstract rendering of a Swedish town and RPG.

A large part of the gameplay is playing a semi-isometric (you can manuever the camera as you please) RPG. You are a young Swedish boy with no job and no love, who gets a call from a job offer one day asking him to come to a town across the sea to sell soda. This is typical modern Nordic design. When you first land, you go check into a run-down hotel, scheduled for you by your employer, and find your door leads to a bathroom. You inquire about this to the hostess, who calls in a repairman that fixes the door - that is to say, he makes it lead to a bedroom instead of a bathroom - by using a weird device. This is your first introduction to the best part of the game: you can modify most entities in the game through code.

However, you are unable to access this portion of the game until 30 minutes in. Also typical Nordic design. Instead, you have to play a social RPG in Sweden, either looking for a device like the one the repairman had, or trying to follow the main story by talking to a woman named "Pixie," who the main character falls in love with yet is taken by a man named Ivan.

Once you get a modifier (the hacking device in-game), the game reveals its full form. How the hacking works is that through your device, you can modify the properties of most entities in the game, excluding humans and background items. The limitations of your hacking are in your device, which has an access level, and the entity you're hacking. Certain entities carry functions for drinking or restoring sleepiness and smelliness, some carry functions for refilling those drinking entities, some are computers that can read disks and drives, some can find any person and the room he's in, some can find every room in the game and all items within, etc.

Through these machines, you can become a god. If you figure out how, you can hack your credit card to code yourself infinite money. With the right computer, you can teleport into test rooms, steal teleporters, rewire any door, teleport people, earn big bucks at the casino, and unlock every door in the game, amongst many other things. This is the most fun part of the game and it's easy to accomplish the aforementioned with simple code. The code itself is in a custom language akin to Lua.

The story is alright. It's slow to figure out where people are and it's quick to move on from the last element, never dwelling - or elaborating - on individual plot points. Again, very, very Nordic: go and do and accept it and move on. The story acts to introduce new coding challenges to you and to give you an end goal. Speaking of the story...

At the very end of the game you shut down the central machine of the head of the Computer Ministry, helping Pixie's boyfriend Ivan. In doing so, you cause the Ministry to come after you. Because the Ministry is very powerful and very adept at finding people, you cannot hide anywhere: no, in fact you have to leave the island, without saying goodbye to anyone, and without telling Pixie anything. You never reveal your feelings, there's no emotional discord, just move in, through, and out of the island. Basically, you get cucked at the end, helping everyone and then being ejected. GG?

The real short-comings of this game stem from its RPG nature. You have to wander around a lot, wait and tail people, and go searching for the individuals you want to help. And if you find the powerful computers in the early game, you can teleport yourself around by using door names and trivialize a lot of challenges, like figuring out how to enter the Ministry head's apartment or finding Ivan or entering the Casino with a modifier. And then everything is just a matter of teleporting yourself around, which is dull. The silliest way to make the game easy, however, is the easiest: if you unlock your modifier's full potential, you can hack everything, including doors and computers that hold puzzles and challenges, allowing you to trivialize them. And unlocking your modifier is as easy as hacking it.

Because of how slow the game is, because of the delay at the beginning preventing you from coding, and because of the very lax limitations on what you can do, the game becomes very dull towards the end. But those very same "lax limitations" allow you to code anything you want - and even changing the game's files is as easy as putting new code in through the game's own language, GRIMM. And this liberality extends to quests - you can do anything at any point in any way and still finish them. For these two reasons, the game is notable and worth playing at least part-way, despite its slow pace.