The Blood of Dawnwalker: The Heart Wants What It Wants Guide

To start The Heart Wants What It Wants, first unlock A Mother’s Plea from the Uriash Matriarch in Uriash Village, then find Ocha in Svartrau City’s tavern and beat her in the mandatory unarmed brawl. That fight is the real quest trigger: after Ocha goes down, Nora interrupts and takes the conversation upstairs, which opens the next stage. The other big fail point comes later inside Andrei’s route. If you reach the memento choice, pick the ring. Giving Ocha the pendant or cleaver fails the ritual and pushes the quest into the combat resolution instead. [1][2][3]

Make a manual save before entering Andrei’s hideout and again before handing Ocha a memento. This is a missable relationship quest, and the wrong memento cannot be corrected without reloading an earlier save. [1][9]

Table of Contents (8)

Prerequisite: Unlock A Mother’s Plea in Uriash Village

The Heart Wants What It Wants is a sub-quest in Ocha’s Uriash clan storyline, not a standalone mission you simply pick up in Svartrau. The chain begins in Uriash Village. Speak peacefully to the Uriash Matriarch and stay on the non-hostile dialogue path so she offers A Mother’s Plea, which sends you to find her daughter Ocha and ask her to return home.

1. Speak to the Uriash Matriarch in Uriash Village.
2. Use non-hostile dialogue choices until she offers A Mother’s Plea.
3. Accept the objective to locate her daughter, Ocha, and convince her to return to the clan.
4. Travel to Svartrau City.

If you are still working through the opening objectives, use FinalBoss’s The Blood of Dawnwalker prologue walkthrough to clear the early route first. This quest can be missed by leaving key opening content unfinished, so it is better treated as part of your active early-game route than as cleanup you can casually circle back to later. [4][9]

Find Ocha at the Svartrau Tavern

From the Altenmarkt Shrine, head toward the tavern marked with a cup icon on the city map, near the market stalls. If the room is crowded, use Focus Mode — the game’s highlighting vision for important people and objects — to spot Ocha, the Uriash woman tied to the A Mother’s Plea marker. [3][5]

Talking to Ocha always turns into a fistfight, regardless of your dialogue choice. She takes the confrontation outside, and you must defeat her unarmed before the quest can move forward. This is not a dialogue puzzle you can finesse around, and it is not a step you can bypass by running ahead to another marker.

Once Ocha is down, Nora intervenes and brings you upstairs. Finish that conversation to formally add The Heart Wants What It Wants to the active Ocha/Nora storyline. If you were stuck because the quest would not appear in your log, this is usually the missing step: the unarmed win comes first, the upstairs follow-up comes second. [1][3][5]

How to Enter Andrei’s Hideout

After the upstairs meeting, the next obstacle is Andrei’s butcher shop in Svartrau. This is where most players hit the second wall. The quest offers a cheaper social route through the butcher, a night-time balcony route, and a costly Katja branch. If you want the most straightforward entry, the butcher route is the practical pick as long as you have 50 denarii and at least one silver item in your inventory.

Route	Requirement	What it does	Key risk
Butcher and silver phrase	50 denarii and at least one silver item	Gets you inside through the front entrance	The dialogue option does not appear without silver in your inventory
Balcony infiltration	Night-time access	Reaches the upstairs room and mementos directly	Going downstairs starts Andrei’s combat route
Katja branch	400 denarii	Offers another way into the situation	Its full branch consequences are not fully documented

Route 1: Use the Butcher’s Silver Code Phrase

1. Follow the marker to the butcher’s stall in Svartrau.
2. During the day, use Focus Mode nearby to locate the beggar sitting in the street.
3. Pay the beggar 50 denarii for information on reaching Andrei.
4. Make sure you are carrying at least one silver item.
5. Talk to the butcher and select “I have some silver to sell.”
6. Show the silver when the butcher escorts you inside, then proceed to Andrei upstairs.

The silver is the real gate here. Paying the beggar gives you the lead, but it does not unlock the butcher’s line by itself. The selling-silver option only appears if a silver item is actually in your inventory. If you do not already have one, Focus Mode can reveal hidden city caches through glowing wall markings, and progress in Vicho’s A Study in Crimson can also open access to a hidden box with silver items through Eli’s Jewelry Key. [2][3][5]

Once inside, stay cooperative if you want to preserve Ocha and Nora’s intended plan. Antagonizing Andrei can turn the meeting into a fight early, which closes off the quieter spell setup you are here for. [1][5]

Route 2: Enter Through the Upper Balcony at Night

At night, you can reach the upper-floor balcony of the butcher shop and enter the upstairs room directly. This route skips the beggar payment and the silver check, which is handy if you would rather go straight to the key quest item than spend time hunting inventory requirements. [1][2]

• Ring — the correct item for Ocha’s spell.
• Pendant — causes the spell to fail.
• Cleaver — causes the spell to fail.

Take the ring, then return to Ocha instead of heading down through the staircase door. Going downstairs starts the direct confrontation with Andrei and effectively commits you to the combat resolution. [1]

If you still want broader setup help for movement, combat, or early progression before attempting this route, FinalBoss’s early-build guide for The Blood of Dawnwalker covers the wider early-game tradeoffs without repeating this quest’s story path.

Story Spoilers: Complete Ocha’s Spell and Protect Her Return

The rest of this guide reveals Andrei’s fate and the outcome of Ocha’s Uriash storyline.

With the ring in hand, give it to Ocha to make her amnesia spell work. Then open the pig pen beside the butcher’s shop to distract the guard, and draw the hex on the outside wall where Ocha instructs. If you do those steps correctly, the ritual resolves Andrei without forcing the direct boss-style fight route. [1]

If you hand Ocha the pendant or cleaver, the spell fails and you must kill Andrei in combat. The same broad result follows if you go downstairs and start the fight yourself: Andrei dies, but you lose the cleaner ritual version of the plan. [1]

This is why the memento choice matters more than anything else in the hideout. A lot of quest choices in narrative RPGs bend and flex a little. This one really does not. Ring means the spell path. Pendant or cleaver means the spell breaks and the quest turns violent. [1][2][3]

Final Ocha Choice: How to Get the Positive Uriash Outcome

After Andrei dies through either route, meet Ocha outside Svartrau City for the final conversation. If you want the positive Uriash outcome, choose the supportive responses that encourage her return home and her responsibility to the clan. Guides consistently point to three return-leaning prompts here, including responses such as “Do you miss home?”, “New things can be exciting, sure.”, and “Our neighbors helped a bit.” Create a save before this talk if you are unsure, because public guides agree this is a dialogue check and do not fully map every negative branch. [2][3][4][5][9]

Resolving Ocha’s return successfully grants the reported reward of 250 XP and the Broad Swing Manual. One guide also lists 150 denarii as part of the same reward package. [2]

One last practical note: ordinary exploration and routine combat do not advance the game’s time system, while quests and certain major activities do. That gives you breathing room to search for silver, wait for night, or retry your hideout approach before you lock in the decisive conversations. In other words, this quest is missable, but it is not usually rushed by the clock minute to minute. [10]

If you only wanted the shortest version, it is this: unlock A Mother’s Plea, beat Ocha in the unarmed tavern brawl, follow Nora upstairs, use silver to enter the butcher shop or go in from the balcony at night, take the ring, and push Ocha toward going home in the final conversation. That sequence avoids the most common dead ends and keeps the quest on its strongest outcome track.

Sources

• [1] PC Gamer, The Blood of Dawnwalker: The Heart Wants What It Wants walkthrough, September 3, 2026.
• [2] Sportskeeda, How to complete The Heart Wants What It Wants, September 4, 2026.
• [3] Method, The Heart Wants What It Wants quest guide, September 3, 2026.
• [4] ggRealm, The Blood of Dawnwalker complete walkthrough, September 2, 2026.
• [5] GameRant, The Heart Wants What It Wants Ocha quest guide, September 3, 2026.