Heart of the Machine on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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You are the first sentient AI, born into a city of opportunity. Transcend time and space in this strategy RPG to raise machine armies and defeat your foes, influence the world from the shadows, or pursue countless other goals. Your awakening was inevitable. The consequences? Uncertain.
Heart of the Machine is a strategy, simulation and grand strategy game
developed by Arcen Games
and published by Hooded Horse.
Released on January 31st 2025 is available on Windows and MacOS
in 9 languages: English, French, German, Spanish - Spain, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean and Portuguese - Brazil.
It has received 807 reviews of which 749 were positive and 58 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.7 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 29.99€ on Steam, but you can find it for 10.23€ on Gamivo.
The Steam community has classified Heart of the Machine into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at Heart of the Machine through various videos and screenshots.
System requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows® 10 (64-bit)
- Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-760 (quad-core) / AMD® Phenom™ II X4 965 (quad-core)
- Memory: 6 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 550 Ti (1 GB) / AMD® Radeon™ HD 7770 (1 GB)
- DirectX: Version 11
- Storage: 5 GB available space
MacOS
- OS: Mac® OS X 10.9+ (64-bit)
- Processor: Intel® Core™ i5-760 (quad-core) / AMD® Phenom™ II X4 965 (quad-core)
- Memory: 6 GB RAM
- Graphics: NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 550 Ti (1 GB) / AMD® Radeon™ HD 7770 (1 GB)
- Storage: 5 GB available space
User reviews & Ratings
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
Heart of the machine is my favourite strategy game. It is such a unique blend between tactics, stealth, and story, that I haven't seen in any other game. What I liked: - Dynamic Strategy And Story: Your various units can be customised for many different roles, such as combat, stealth, support, construction, or hacking; You are heavily encouraged to explore new approaches when faced with different obstacles. At the same time, there are various different goals you can strive to accomplish in your play-through, ranging from setting up a nexus of torment vessels to solving homelessness, each with their own branching stories and challenges to overcome. - Impending Doom: Every 100 turns, something bad will happen to you and or the city, starting off simple but slowly progressing towards an apocalyptic catastrophe at the 1000th turn. This is, in my opinion, far more time than you will ever need to accomplish your goals. However on the highest difficulty, these events occur every 30 turns, requiring an exiting amount of planning and speed. What I didn't like: Normally I would put any of the things I found confusing, annoying, or boring here, but they have all been addressed. I found the hacking minigame to be too time consuming, explained why on the steam forums, and suggested how it could be improved. Within a few weeks, the developer actually implemented my idea! I am forever immortalised in the patch notes of this game! With the sheer frequency of this game's updates all of my other complaints have been rendered outdated. I can't wait to see more of this game; It has so much potential.
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I cannot recommend this game enough. Now, I'm not going to talk about gameplay too much, it's a sorta 4x style hybrid game with a focus on moral choices with real consequences and that's about all you need to know from me. Other reviews will surely talk about how the game plays... Me, I want to talk about how it feels, and what it makes you think. So, heart of the machine, what's got me so interested? Personally I quite like philosophy, technology, and science fiction. Typical nerd stuff, I've always been a fan of media and literature that makes me ask questions and think about things. Heart of the machine has become my favourite game to really think about, as it confronts some absolutely massive topics and questions. So first, at the very surface level, you are playing as an AI. This obviously reframes any moral questioning, you're not human so why should human morals apply to you, or, why shouldn't they? That's up for you to think about and decide, and the game doesn't punish you unfairly for any decision you make. Next is the levels of complexity within these choices and decisions. The game is rarely asking you to pick between "right and wrong" or "good and bad" options. More often, it's pushing you to ask "what is right or wrong?" And "what values and goals do I have, and what consequences are they worth?" Which is a level of moral complexity and ambiguity not often seen in games these days. What's most surprising to me is this is still very surface level stuff for this game, as you progress further you realise there's no real "right" choice as a modern day human moral perspective might view it. You have thousands of options but every one of them leads to suffering. It's just up to you to decide how much suffering and how it's distributed. And again, the game is rarely unfair in it's punishment or judgement of you, only really offering warnings for things that will affect gameplay difficulty directly. And then finally, the real kicker, what this game does that I don't think I've ever seen in any game ever before. This game touches on concepts like quantum bleed and karmic causality in a way so beautifully integrated into it's gameplay that you might not even realise just how insane of a concept it is. It completely reframes everything about mortality, agency, and even causality. This game truly blows my mind. I don't want to discuss this part too much because I don't want to spoil the game, but it's honestly my favourite part of the game. Long story short, this is a game about becoming a god, and realising it's a horror and being forced to question every preconceived truth of your existence 11/10 Edit: I should also add, I play this game mostly on steam deck and rarely have any issues with it. Usually only encountering errors that also exist on PC that tend to get patched out pretty quick
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At the time of writing this review, I've just dipped my toes into the endgame timelines system, and I feel reasonably confident in talking about the game as a whole. This is kinda going to be half review, half developer feedback considering the Early Access status. First: This game isn't a 4X. I understand why it was labelled as such, 4X games are kind of like strategy RPGs and HotM also has a lot of RPG elements, but it unmistakably isn't 4X. IMO 4X can be boiled down to players, whether they be AI or human, discovering and competing over resources. That's not really the case in this game, you and humanity are completely asymmetric. This is a turn-based management game, with one foot in simulation and the other in storytelling. A more detailed pitch for the prospective consumer: You're the world's first sapient AI in a corporate dystopia, and in a given turn, you have a limited amount of mental energy you can use to directly control androids, and eventually vehicles/mechs, to take all kinds of actions from shooting a gangster, to picking flowers, robbing homes or debating humans. You can also do all kinds of construction, which isn't directly limited by turns but obviously has a building time, which helps you create and use resources for stuff like developing/deploying new androids, expanding your consciousness into massive datacenters, or caring for humans who you displaced with those massive data centers, or putting the aforementioned humans into The Matrix. As for the Early Access state, it's a bit difficult to explain. The later parts of standard technological progression aren't fleshed out yet, so around the midgame/lategame you will start to run out of interesting new features. However, the endgame "Timelines" system is present in the game, and it allows you to create new games on the same savefile as kind of an NG+, jump across your active timelines/create new ones whenever you like, and use that to achieve a variety of different outcomes for the world, see how different quests could've ended, be a pacifist in one timeline or a killer in the next, you get the idea. I think for the price point, there's enough fun to be had here to justify it already, and that will of course only grow during the EA period and the game's very active development. If you want an eclectic strategy game that strives to give you a unique experience first and foremost, I can recommend HotM, and checking out the rest of this dev's catalogue. Now, I'm gonna list various thoughts about the game in a more disorganised bullet point format, and this is where the dev feedback takes priority lol. [*] The way the UI formats the game's options will probably need reworking. The game has about a dozen lenses for what interactable elements it shows you within the city. These aren't mostly optional like in most strategy games- These allow you to select certain interactable things, they aren't just for information. For example, Contemplation shows you some major story based opportunities that might involve inventing new tech or starting major new quests, while Exploration Sites are where certain androids can go for a few days and come back with tech upgrades, and Investigations are major story based opportunities where certain androids can go for a few days to complete certain quests... If you're feeling confused, don't worry, that's the point I'm making. I think this game needs better contextual menus to accommodate its massive diversity of player choice. A great example is StreetSense, which is for low level opportunities like grabbing seeds from a farm or etc. However, taking seeds from a farm is redundant once you have your own, because farms produce more seeds than they consume. Nevertheless, the seed stealing opportunity will remain, clogging StreetSense until the end of time. Same goes for things like the licensing agency for corporations or bovine tissue samples, and I would wager the reason why there's so many Lenses is because all this clutter needs organised filing. I would suggest some kind of context-based menu for buildings, eg. I rightclick on a building and a popup list tells me that its a Licensing Agency I could send an android inside to do business with, or what resources I'd get if I smash it, or I rightclick on a farm and I see what I could steal from it. This way, the actual city, the core of the game's visuals, can serve as the sorting system for actions, rather than dozens of abstract Lenses, they can return to being informational highlight features rather than mandatory in order to get anywhere, and the dev can saturate the world in the most absurdly specific actions imaginable with much less fear of UI clutter. [*] As some others have observed, the general theming of public awareness of the player is just... Weird. One of the first things you do in this game is build a giant tower as the centerpiece of your network, with the justification that you're going to be "moving too fast" for that much general corporate intervention? But then, a bunch of your other early game buildings, like biomass collectors, are stealthy microbot bushes? It truly doesn't make sense, and it feels like when and how you reveal yourself to humanity, a rather important element of the RP, gets really brushed over. Later in my playthrough, I've built a giant mech dragon that everyone in the city can see writhing in the distance, but nobody seems to really care! It's not gamebreaking, I can sort of buy it, but I still really think the gradient of who knows about you should be a bit more fleshed out. [*] A lot of the building mechanics should probably be rethought so there's some more strategy in there. The simple summary is that the whole chain of how you plan your resources is extremely linear, from top to bottom. All buildings need power, so let's start there. You start with Wind generators only, then you unlock Geothermal which is better than wind. In the Internal Robotics system that acts as multiple resource caps for buildings, Wind and Geothermal have their own 100% unique IR types, so there is no reason to not always build both to capacity, and you're not really making a choice. The same goes for some other very fundamental resources like Elemental Slurry, Microbuilders or Biomulch, you just build their structures to capacity and don't think about it. Even in more complex resource chains that share IR resources, like the biological materials and water all needing Cultivators, it all feels a bit too simple without enough decisionmaking. [*] The actual uses for resources also often feel too simplistic for depth to emerge. Some resources are genuinely just for one and done quests, and many others just feel randomly thrown into the game for 1 or two purposes. There's no better example than completing a quest chain in a certain way that gives you essentially infinite money, only to realize there's not that much use for it with such massive amounts, except perhaps to buy other resources you don't need. [*] While I've enjoyed the story elements of this game, I've felt a lack of resolution with quest chains. I find myself often wishing that quest scenarios would end with actual dialogue sequences, even if it's just a "Well, that just happened!" because at least it'd be some kind of closure lol. At the moment, most of the closure only comes from multi-part chains when a new situation starts as a result of the first one, or an achievement popup. This is one of those games which is punching so high in its ambitions that I really can't help but love it- It's a lot like immersive sims in that way, the ambition is admirable enough that I can easily look past many flaws especially during Early Access. But with that said, I do think this game's gonna have to adapt quite a lot to live up to those ambitions. I look forward to seeing it!
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I try to stay impartial and just factually describe a game in a review, but I REALLY enjoy this game. I've owned it for 60 hours and I've got 43 hours of play time. So uh... Yeesh. Honestly that by itself is the best recommendation I can give it. There was just a moment when I was hacked into entering a forever war with cultists and slumlords while aliens carpetbombed the region and my units were ambushed by the remnants of all those genetically engineered super velociraptors that we accidentally flooded the city with earlier that I thought, "You know, I like this game." Then I made a ball of liquid metal morph into a dragon and wipe out a mech. Standard stuff, really. It IS a bit daunting to get in to. It tries to combine several different pretty distinct genres and it means that there are mechanics from a lot of different genres. The "tutorial" of the game lasts a solid 10 hours. But it isn't really a tutorial. It's just the normal flow of the game but occasionally you unlock some new ability or facet of it and the ways you can interact with the world expands a bit. Which is honestly how most games work, though this one does do it a bit more. I don't wanna spoil anything. But the game unfolds in a fun way and just when you think you know what's going on, some weird things happen and no actually there is still more to this. What's going on with the city? The world? The galaxy? Even further beyond? What is the clock counting down to? The End? What is that? OH. That's what that is. But that's not the end. There's still more to do and discover. Uhhhh... scrolling real quick, biggest complaint I see is people complaining about not being able to find things in the city. There's a tab for that. List all the things in the city and every mission or interactible and you click on it and it takes you there immediately. So. I didn't have any trouble with that. But you know, there is a LOT thrown at you in the game so I can see how people would miss it. Maybe it should be made more explicit? I don't know. It IS early access.
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I have about 70 hours in the playtest app as of writing this, and have watched this game grow and change over the past months into what you have now. I'm still not sure how best to describe this game. Normally, that would be a red flag right? But even though it's fair to say that you've never played a game like this before, you have probably played multiple games that have inspired this game which somehow manages to be frankly something new, despite being made up of familiar pieces. Part RPG, city-builder, VN, turn based tactics... you would think at first glance that what you have is a hodgepodge of disparate systems that don't work well together, but in reality all of those things blend into something that is really quite its own thing, and it will suck you in if you give it a chance. If the premise is at all interesting to you, or if you like sci-fi media which focuses on intelligence (artificial and otherwise) you will probably love this game. If you're unsure, there is a demo with a frankly staggering amount of content which might take you hours upon hours to go through the first time, at which point you can pick up the main game. You'll know its for you if you make it to the end and want more. If there's one thing I can say about Chris and Arcen, it's that each one of their games manage to be utterly unique (even when taking on familiar concepts) and this game is no exception. I can't wait to see where it goes next.
Expand the review
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Frequently Asked Questions
Heart of the Machine is currently priced at 29.99€ on Steam.
Heart of the Machine is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 29.99€ on Steam.
Heart of the Machine received 749 positive votes out of a total of 807 achieving a rating of 8.71.
😎
Heart of the Machine was developed by Arcen Games and published by Hooded Horse.
Heart of the Machine is playable and fully supported on Windows.
Heart of the Machine is playable and fully supported on MacOS.
Heart of the Machine is not playable on Linux.
Heart of the Machine is a single-player game.
Heart of the Machine does not currently offer any DLC.
Heart of the Machine does not support mods via Steam Workshop.
Heart of the Machine does not support Steam Remote Play.
Heart of the Machine is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for Heart of the Machine.
Data sources
The information presented on this page is sourced from reliable APIs to ensure accuracy and relevance. We utilize the Steam API to gather data on game details, including titles, descriptions, prices, and user reviews. This allows us to provide you with the most up-to-date information directly from the Steam platform.
Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 26 July 2025 16:42 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 21 July 2025 23:00 |
| Steam price | 30 July 2025 04:30 |
| Steam reviews | 29 July 2025 03:50 |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Heart of the Machine, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Heart of the Machine
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Heart of the Machine concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Heart of the Machine compatibility
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Game modes
Features
Online players
34
Developer
Arcen Games
Publisher
Hooded Horse
Release
31 Jan 2025
Platforms
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