ELDERGATE: THE LAST HEARTS

Matthew, Isaac, and Ian clean out abandoned houses for a living — dusty rooms, broken furniture, other people's forgotten lives. It's routine. It's boring. Until they find an old, unlabeled game cartridge buried in a box no one was supposed to open. They plug it in just to laugh at it. Instead, the screen swallows them whole. Now they're standing inside Eldergate — a world of stone gates, forgotten magic, and rules that feel just a little too real. The game gives them hearts instead of lives. Lose them all, and you don't just lose the game. You get erased — from Eldergate, and from the real world too. No continues. No second chances. They fight. They bleed hearts. They almost tear each other apart before the game does it for them. And just when they think they've won — when the victory screen flashes and they can finally breathe — something else is waiting behind it. One of them won't make it out with a heartbeat. But not everything that dies in Eldergate... stays dead.