Game Recommendation: Haven

[zen]

I found Haven through a “fiction discussions” thread on a Discord site for a comic artist I support on Patreon. The reason the person posted about it was that Haven’s devs had put out an update about a year after it was released to allow the player to choose between playing the game with the two main protagonists being straight, gay, or lesbian, and the comic artist is primarily a GL comic artist. When I checked out the store page on Steam and watched a couple of the trailers, as well as the live play through the game devs were doing of the game with the two female characters at the time, I liked what I saw enough to pick up the game.

The main things that drew me in were the way the two main characters were fleshed out in just the trailers and small amounts of game stream that I saw and the way they designed the leveling system in the game. I could tell that the devs went to great lengths to subvert gender stereotypes with their original character concepts for the original “Male Kay and Female Yu” characters. Kay is a person of color; an orphan; a biologist; does the cooking; etc… Yu is an engineer; the pilot; fixes things around “The Nest” (their ship, which she built), grew up rich (one of her mothers was Kay’s boss… well the president of the company Kay worked for); and is, by far, the more aggressive of the two (one of the scenes in the trailer shows Yu stating, quite clearly, that if the government they’re running from sends people after them and ‘worst comes to worst,' she’ll kill them… kill them, steal their ship, and be gone before they send someone else. This shocks Kay.)

As for the leveling mechanic, it is largely based on gaining “relationship moments” with the two characters more than combat or even exploring the world and collecting the items needed to complete missions. Those DO contribute, but sharing meals together with new recipes (combinations of ingredients really) and doing other things around “The Nest” contribute as much or more to leveling the characters. As for combat, you fight with both characters at the same time, which took me a while to be able to do well. The controls are on both sides of the keyboard and I found it very easy to have one of my hands off by a key and mess up, but other than one enemy, losing a battle only results in going back to the nest injured and needing to use large amounts of healing to get up to full health. (With that “one enemy”, though, a loss results in a “game over” and going back to the last save point or taking the “bad ending”.)

The basic storyline of Haven is:
“Two lovers gave up everything and escaped to a lost planet to be together. Glide through a mysterious landscape, explore a fragmented world and fight against what’s trying to tear them apart in this RPG adventure about love, rebellion, and freedom.”

It’s a wonderfully dystopian world, where “The Council” has been ruling over “The Apiary” for millennia and “The Matchmaker”, an AI that selects your mate by genetic and, supposedly, interpersonal compatibility, controls who you will marry and have children with. This system was developed to counteract a genetic disease known as “The Mark”, which it successfully eliminated, but people fear it will return if they stop using “The Matchmaker” to protect themselves from it. Yu and Kay have both been assigned to other mates and are running from that fate. The world they run to is one that Kay found information about in the archives of the company she worked for, which Yu's mother runs. The data she found indicated that the company was contracted to work on the colonization of the planet, but it was abandoned, with no reasons given. When they arrive they find that the planet has a large number of floating "islets" held together in the gravity well instead of being the standard, spherical shape. They also discover that the records Kay found were not entirely truthful about the colonization efforts... It appears that there has been a cover-up of what actually happened to the colony that might impact the viability of Yu and Kay being able to survive on the planet or remain hidden from The Council.

The gameplay is relatively simple and, in general, I found that the best part of the game is the depiction of the relationship of the protagonists. There was a bit of an unnecessary uproar after the "couples update" when a group of people was angry that they added a male version of Yu and a female version of Kay but didn't add the ability to play the game with "Male Yu and Female Kay" as the protagonists. The developers answered this criticism with the exact answer that I had thought they would: They didn't want to add back the gender stereotypes that they purposefully subverted in the original character builds by having a "Rich, aggressive, male engineer" and a "poor, orphaned, female, biologist, who likes to cook". People were perceiving it as a racial thing, but they were looking at the gender stereotypes that the characters present and didn't want to introduce those stereotypes into the game. (Though, depending on how you pick answers, either of the two can end up being the character who needs to be saved in certain situations based on a "confidence" metric. So far I've yet to answer the questions in a way to NOT end up with Yu on the "needs saving" end... mostly because I answer the questions in a way that seems natural for the characters, which leads to that result, based on my concept of the characters. If there is one thing that I think could be improved it would be to add in an option to have neither "need saving" if the confidence metric is even. However, that would be hellish to do, I'd think.)

[Pdyx]

I think it's really cool and interesting that they added the update to the game a year later. I've got this one on my radar.