You can download and play Heartbeats in Perfect Sync on my itchio page.

In your city, there’s an otherworldly force that lurks in the hearts of many: The Pulse. Feeding on negative emotions, they’ll devour everything… if not for a group of ordinary people with a mysterious app installed on their phones. Activate the app and you’ll be bestowed with a weapon that can purge the Pulse, but opening your heart can be dangerous…

Heartbeats in Perfect Sync is a tabletop RPG inspired by the shounen battle aesthetic in games like The World Ends With You, Kingdom Hearts and Under Night In-Birth. Play as a group of ordinary people who fight monsters with ridiculously over-the-top weapons.

Use the Heart Rate system (a pool of dice that increases and decreases as you make rolls and ratchet up your character’s emotional tension) to perform astounding Perfect Sync attacks with your allies on the same wavelength.

But beware – if your Heart Rate gets too high or too low, your character will become Heartbroken, a dark version of themselves with new abilities and a high budget transformation cutscene.

Fonts used are from Google Fonts, BlamBot and Chequered Ink. Illustrations are writer’s own, heart graphic from game-icons.net, photography from Unsplash.com. Special thanks to Will Uhl (@RaffiTheOwl), Jay (@Stabbyness), and Austin (@CorpGeomancy).