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Maddie Raines has had enough. After years of serving as manager, editor, and general business-handler for her best friend Tara's popular paranormal vlog channel, she's finally ready to move forward with her own life. But when she agrees to take one last trip with Tara to the mysterious village of Eysenfeld, she's suddenly swept up in a dangerous supernatural crisis that will change the course of both of their lives forever. A strange young woman named Morgan has promised them undeniable proof of real paranormal phenomena, and what she has to offer eclipses anything they’d ever seen before.
However, out of all the strange occurrences the three of them bear witness to, one in particular captivates Maddie in a way she’s never been before: the ghost of a young woman. This woman is Abigail, the victim of a centuries-old injustice now bound eternally to the forest surrounding Eysenfeld. Drawn to Maddie in a way she can’t explain, Abigail reveals herself to another person for the first time in more than 200 years.
While Tara and Morgan investigate the mysteries surrounding the village itself, Maddie begins to form a bond with Abigail that grows to be more intense than any bond she’s felt before. As she learns the truth about Abigail’s death and imprisonment, she realizes that it falls to her and her friends to break the curse that has ruled over Eysenfeld for centuries. But more importantly than that, it falls to her to finally free the woman she loves.


A part-time manager, part time video editor, and full-time babysitter, Maddie has the thankless job of handling the absolute whirlwind that is her best friend.
She’s professional, meticulous and intellectual; the first person to turn to when a problem needs solving. But when their investigation entangles her in an ancient curse, she's forced to confront phenomena beyond her comprehension, and more importantly, her own self doubt.

For the last two centuries, the ghost of a young woman has haunted the forests of Eysenfeld. That ghost is Abigail, a kind and playful soul forcibly bound to the forest as part of an ancient curse.
Two hundred years of wishing for a life cruelly denied to her have led to a feeling of crushing loneliness and one overwhelming desire: to finally have someone to talk to.

One of the world’s most popular paranormal vloggers (according to her), Tara is unfailingly charismatic and bursting with limitless energy. She’s brash, intrepid, and always seeking something new. That often makes her a magnet for trouble: whether it’s from relentless flirting, minor criminal activities or just plain pig-headedness, things around Tara have a tendency to end in chaos.

A loyal Taranormal viewer and the daughter of Eysenfeld’s mayor, Morgan is...different. When not running her small and mostly empty antique shop, she’s known to disappear into the woods for days at a time. That, combined with her resistance to traditional social standards, has caused her to develop a bit of a notorious reputation in the village.
However, this resistance is not just an act of rebellion: Morgan knows that there’s something sinister deep within Eysenfeld, and she’s not going to stop until she tears it out at the roots.

-Incredible character and CG art from Rosuuri
-Fully original backgrounds and soundtrack
-Approximately 130,000 words with multiple endings
-Ending theme from In Love With A Ghost
-Multiple accessibility options
-Extra features including a music room, CG viewer, and guest art gallery
-At least one really, really gay ghost
Hello, everyone!
Right on the heels of Heart of the Woods' 4th anniversary, we've just released a major update to Heart of the Woods!
Heart of the Woods 2.1 fixes many long-standing issues of varying severity, vastly improves controller support, and even adds native support for ARM Linux (arm64 / AArch64, armv7) notably including Asahi Linux (arm64e / Apple Silicon)!
To go along with the 4th anniversary, we also have a new short story and artwork featuring Tara and Morgan! You can see them in our Patreon post here: https://patreon.com/posts/78737674
As always, thank you all for supporting Studio lan across these many years!
Karen/ (akemin_dayo) and adirosa
Changelog for 2.1:
Note regarding native Apple Silicon (arm64 / AArch64) Mach-O slices on macOS: Ren'Py unfortunately does not support this configuration upstream yet, and attempts at building it manually have failed due to toolchain issues.For the time being, Apple's Rosetta 2 x86_64 translation layer (which will be installed automatically) will still be required to play Heart of the Woods.
New features
- Added a detailed README found in the game directory please give it a read![/*]
- Added a macOS DMG background. It is also available as bonus content in the game directory.[/*]
- Added native support for ARM Linux (arm64 / AArch64, armv7) notably including Asahi Linux (arm64e / Apple Silicon)![list]
- Note for ARM Linux users: You will not be able to earn Steam achievements/trophies while running native ARM Linux builds of the game, as Valve currently only provides an x86_64 version of the Steamworks dynamic library for Linux (libsteam_api.so).[list]
- If you run the x86_64 build of the game via a translation layer such as Box64 or FEX, Steam achievements/trophies should work as expected.[/*]
General bug fixes
- Completely rewrote Steam achievement/trophy functionality. Issues fixed by this change are listed below.[list]
- Fixed all known issues related to difficulties earning achievements/trophies.[/*]
- Fixed an issue where achievement/trophy state could desynchronise between local persistent save data and Steam.[/*]
Localisation bug fixes
- Fixed an issue where some strings and dialogue in the Traditional Chinese (), Simplified Chinese (), German (Deutsch), and Spanish (Espaol) would erroneously display completely empty.[list]
- This also fixes an issue where some preference categories would appear to be missing from the preference pane.[/*]
Scene-specific bug fixes
- Improved the presentation of the title logo scene across the aerial shot of Eysenfeld shown at the end of Scene 1-1.[/*]
- Fixed an issue where the title logo scene would persist for longer than intended.[/*]
- Fixed some rendering issues that would occur while transitioning between Scene 1-1 and 1-2.[/*]
- Fixed an issue in Scene 1-4 that would erroneously alter the behaviour of all procedural forests generated afterwards while the game is still open.[/*]
- Fixed an issue in Scene 1-8 where the incorrect transition would play.[/*]
- Fixed missing fade transitions in Scene 3-1.[/*]
- Fixed an issue where a certain character would be wearing the wrong clothing in a scene.[/*]
Changes that affect modders and dataminers
- Wondering where some defines went? They've probably been moved inside MorganKit.[/*]
- Rearranged many assets internally and removed all erroneously duplicated assets.[/*]
- Removed unused font assets.[/*]
- Changed the way how unused, non-canonical cut content content is stored. This means that you can no longer view cut content the old way.[list]
- To get around this, you can set the console variable showNonCanonicalCutContent = 1 while ingame. Please note that this is an unsupported configuration![/*]
Minimum Setup
- OS: Any reasonably modern Linux distribution ( Roughly equivalent to Ubuntu 16.04 or above.)
- Processor: Any 64-bit Intel. AMD. or ARM / Apple Silicon CPU ( Earning Steam achievements / trophies on ARM Linux requires x86_64 translation.)Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Memory: 1 GB RAM
- Graphics: Any GPU that supports at least OpenGL 2.0 or OpenGL ES 2.0
- Storage: 2 GB available spaceAdditional Notes: Tested on Ubuntu 22.10 (x86_64) and Asahi Linux (arm64e. Apple Silicon).
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