First up, Heileen. You'll remember Tycoon Games from such titles as Bionic Heart and Spirited Heart. Even if you hadn't, one look at the art style will bring those memories shooting back. A peculiarity of their quasi-anime aesthetic is that the female characters all look rabid, like they're about to start laughing wildly and stabbing you with a knife. But I digress.

Heileen is an adventure game that takes place in the 17th century, though you'd hardly know it from the way everyone speaks; everything's pretty casual. There's a pretty evident lack of understanding what life was really like in those days, which probably shouldn't have bothered me, but it did. Because if you're not going to bother to firmly ground the story in the time, why even stage it there? Nothing that happens during the demo required the 17th century to make it work. I'll let it go now, sorry.

Like the other aforementioned titles, Heileen is a game that will interest a specific range of players. It's pretty text-heavy, which requires a lot of clicking. You can use the Page Up and Page Down buttons or the scroll wheel to go back and forth over text you've already seen, but you can only go forward by clicking. Right-clicking brings up the menu. Should you choose to start again, you can press the Control key to fast forward through text you've accessed previously.

The story is linear, offering two or three options at different junctures; mostly dialogue choices that will lead the story along different paths. You are in passive control of Heileen, who is on her first trip away from Liverpool, England, traveling with her uncle, his mistress, and Heileen's best friend toward America.

Along the way, different secondary "quests" will unlock; you can press the Q key to see them listed. These quests are small things like "Embarrass my uncle". Discovering a quest nets you two points, solving them gets an additional three points. At the game's end, you'll be awarded a title based on the number of points you've accrued.

The problem with Heileen is that there's so much text to slog through, most of it very dull dialogue. What isn't dull is either weirdly phrased -- "I should shut I up" is a sterling example -- or oddly out of place. About halfway through the demo, it seemed that I was actually playing a dating sim instead of a text adventure with static pictures. You'll need to judge for yourself what this game really is. You can grab the demo right here on Big Download for both Mac and PC.