This article contains spoilers for The Wild at Heart (2021, Moonlight Kids/Humble Games). If gaming is among your hobbies, I recommend just playing it instead. It’s exceptional.
The Wild at Heart is an action-adventure game of sorts. Players play as young teenagers Wake and Kirby, best friends who have run away from their homes to live in the woods. Unexpectedly, Wake and Kirby find themselves in a magical realm called the Deep Woods. It’s populated by quirky elder beings, roaming monsters, and little friendly creatures called spritelings. Players team up with squads of spritelings to save the realm from dark forces encroaching upon it.
The game plays similarly to the Pikmin series from Nintendo. Coincidentally, the fourth Pikmin game releases tomorrow (July 21) for the Switch, and that series uses voices similarly as will be discussed here. In The Wild at Heart, players wander about the Deep Woods, collect and spawn spriteling companions of different varieties, battle monsters with their spritelings, and complete quests to save the realm.
The Deep Woods has five kinds of spritelings, each with a unique design and approach to battle, but more relevant to the point, they have their own personalities that are expressed, in part, by their voices. The designers and sound engineers at the game’s developer, Moonlight Kids, imbued the spritelings with voices that both express their personalities and also inform the player of battle conditions.
The sound design in The Wild at Heart is incredible throughout. Simply exploring the Deep Woods is extremely enjoyable because of rolling brooks, swaying trees, cavernous echoes, and the footfall of Wake and Kirby on the surface. But this essay focuses on the voices and sound effects of the spritelings in particular.
I’ve recorded a video of The Wild at Heart to demonstrate the spriteling voices and how audio cues assist the player in combat. This video is clinical to isolate the focus on the spriteling voices, but know that the game in actuality plays smoothly and blends all sorts of sounds wonderfully. It’s a joy to play, and listen to.
There are five spriteling types: Twiglings, Emberlings, Shiverlings, Barblings, and Lunalings. Spritelings can be tossed at objects and monsters to attack them, called back to the player character, split into squads, sent to gather resources, and praised for being perfect just as they are.
When the player tosses a spriteling, the spriteling chirps a signature cry of its type as it flies through the air, both aurally identifying the type and expressing personality for the creature. In this section of the video, I toss each type of spriteling, ten at a time, to demonstrate their range of vocal responses. Each of the spritelings has a distinct voice and is accompanied by unique sound effects.
On blogger, embedded videos always start at the beginning, even with a time code. So I've linked to the timecode of each section instead. The link will open in a new winow.
Notice how the shiverlings (I’ll allow you to infer which ones they are) make little icy crackling sounds as they’re tossed. Emberlings make fire popping sounds as they trill joyfully. And Barblings swish through the air as they spin, rolled into balls. Notice also that each spriteling has a unique landing sound effect. I love that the Twiglings land like stumps.
By holding a shoulder button, players can select their spriteling type with a selection wheel. When a type is highlighted on the wheel (by tilting the analog stick in that direction), the spriteling effect plays there too.
When the player has multiple types of spritelings in tow, he or she may swap between types by pressing a shoulder button. When a spriteling type is swapped to, the spritelings coo distinctively to aurally notify the player which type he or she has at the ready.
Spritelings are tossed one type at a time until that type is depleted, when the next type steps forward. In this video, you’ll see me toss the spritelings one at a time, as before, but listen for the voices when a new rank steps forward. The effect notifies players that they’ve depleted the type they’ve been tossing, that a new type has been selected, and which.
Spritelings are perfect just the way they are, and the player can praise them with a button tap, called a “Quick Pep”. As always, the spritelings purr uniquely when praised. Here they are individually.
Here’s their collective voices when praised in groups. This is also a good demonstration of their landing sounds when dispatched all at once.
And here’s a bunch of spritelings all together.
Finally, here’s a brief clip of combat showing off the variety of sounds during live play. The spritelings make unique attack sounds as well, but they are more difficult to hear because monsters make their own sounds when hit.
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