Originally published at: Coming Thursday! New Heart’s Choice Game “Hearts in Hades: Divine Passion”—Demo and Author Interview Out Now - Choice of Games LLC
Seduce the man of your dreams as the goddess of nightmares! Will you honor the gods of Olympus or consolidate power and rule the Underworld?
Hearts in Hades: Divine Passion is an interactive fantasy romance novel by Lidia Molina Whyte. It’s entirely text-based, 160,000 words, and a 4/5 peppers on the Heart’s Choice spice level rating! I sat down with Lidia to talk about her upcoming game and how a journalist and fiction writer moves to interactive romance.
Hearts in Hades: Divine Passion releases this Thursday, February 12th. You can play the demo today and wishlist it on Steam—even if you intend to buy on a different platform, it really helps.
This is your first time writing interactive fiction but you have a broad background as a writer in general. Tell our readers about yourself!
I have been writing professionally for about 12 years. I started out as an editorial assistant for a local food and culture magazine while I was still at university. I went on to complete a master’s degree in creative writing (though I firmly believe formal education isn’t necessary to be a writer) and have since worked across a variety of mediums including comics, short stories, film, and even an interactive walking adventure. Hearts in Hades is the longest project I’ve finished to date, but I’m currently working on my second long-form project, a fantasy novel inspired by Die Hard. I’m also an editor and regularly help writers get their manuscripts in good shape before they go on sub or are published. I’m not at the stage where I can survive off my creative writing and editing income alone just yet, so I also work as a copywriter and a media, film and TV journalist. There’s a lot going on, but it keeps things interesting!
This game started out with very little spicy content, but as you found your feet, it felt like a natural fit for the story being told. What drew you to the Greek gods for this setting and that kind of content?
I have always been a huge Greco-Roman mythology nerd. Before I pitched to Heart’s Choice, I had been toying with the idea of writing something inspired by the Orphic Hymn to Melinoe, but I wasn’t sure what shape it might take yet. At the time, I was going through a Hesiod phase, had just finished Madeline Miller’s Circe, and was enjoying Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey, so I was very much in the mood for a setting involving gods, mortals and fate. I’m also a big fan of fantasy with strong and complex romance subplots, so it felt like a natural fit; Greek mythology is full of epic love stories (although most of them are extremely dysfunctional by modern standards).
Still, after the pitch was accepted, I was a little hesitant to go all out on the spicy content, even though the source material I was drawing from had no shortage of references to it. I was already stepping out of my comfort zone by tackling interactive fiction. The prospect of learning to code and getting comfortable with a whole new approach to characterisation was daunting enough. Did I also want to add writing fully explicit scenes for the first time to the mix? Once I got to writing, though, I realized I didn’t want to hold myself back like that. I’m so glad I did, because even though they were super challenging to get right, those scenes ended up being some of the most interesting to write. And fun, too!
The romances in this game are intense. If you had to choose, do you know which romance option you’d prefer?
That’s a tough question! I challenged myself to write each romantic option as compellingly as possible. Basically, I wanted to make it really hard for players to choose. I think I might’ve succeeded because I’m struggling to pick myself. I’m a huge enemies-to-lovers fan so I would probably be drawn to Morpheus in a first playthrough. There’s something irresistible about two characters being their worst, pettiest selves with one another and working backwards from there into falling in love. Though I would find it difficult not to romance Ares as soon as he gave me cake, or Theron following that first encounter on his balcony. So it truly would be anyone’s game, I think.
What did you find most surprising about the writing process or the stories you ended up telling in Hearts in Hades?
So many things on both fronts! The most challenging part for me was learning the code. I’m not a very technically-minded person, and I’m atrocious at maths. But once I got to grips with it, I was very surprised at how this style of writing shifted my perspective on storytelling as a whole. I had to do a lot of internal rewiring, but it’s been so worth it. I ended up finding a lot of satisfaction in attacking the same problem in a variety of different ways, and loved not being confined to a single narrative. A specific element I didn’t anticipate would be so rewarding was writing failure scenes. I often found myself trying to make them as narratively enticing as the successes, despite potentially leading to negative consequences or outcomes.
What games do you enjoy playing yourself?
Perhaps unsurprisingly, I’m a big Hades and Hades II fan, and though I beat both games a while ago, I keep going back time and time again. Still also playing Baldur’s Gate 3 regularly (I don’t think I’ll be able to stop until I’ve romanced all the characters). One of my all-time favourite games and the one that inspired me to try out interactive fiction is 80 Days, which I usually replay once a year. On the tabletop side of things, I love playing D&D and very occasionally dabble in DM-ing. My husband and I also enjoy starting weekend days with a board game over breakfast. Our current favourite is, perhaps also unsurprisingly, Iliad, but Wyrmspan and Small World are close seconds.