Day 69 - Heaven Will Be Mine
Visual Novel, Nightmare Fuel, Dating Sim ·
Sam’s Take:
I wanted to play a dating sim for review 69 because I’m extremely funny and clever. I’ve had this game in my Steam library for a few years (probably from a bundle?) and it was on a steep discount, so I bought it for Skeeter as a gift and chose it for the review today.
What I wasn’t expecting was for this game to be someone’s baby opus. Heaven Will Be Mine is a multi-faction sci-fi romance visual novel with enough lore to make Frank Herbert weep. Every screen is filled with pages upon pages of sci-fi lore told as if I live in the world and already understand it.
The (probably intended) effect is that I am constantly drowning in an unknown world and desperately trying to piece together what could possibly be going on. There’s some sort of three-way cold war, people fight in robot suits and they might be clones or mechanized in some way that makes them not 100% human. My character alone (one of three possible choices) has betrayed and then double crossed two sides of this conflict, further confusing the alliances.
Oh yea, remember when I said this was a dating sim?
On each mission you fight one of the other characters in mech combat while exchanging flirtatious banter. While this may sound so embarrassing that you might give up games and become a woodsman, to me this is where the game started to come alive for a moment. All the fighting is done through still images and text. There aren’t tactical choices, this is pure visual novel, literally just choose who you want to win the fight.
Outside of combat, there’s an overuse of young millennial tinged dialogue. Words like “Owned”, “randos” and “bb” are sprinkled liberally throughout the dialogue in a way that feels extremely disingenuous. This is all very time-specific dialogue, and the tech/official documents you read throughout the visual novel seem completely incongruous with that time. These characters have all fought in life and death battles defending their particular beliefs. Obviously any young character is liable to have moments of immaturity, but they have lived full lives at this point, made life altering choices. These are young adults often written like uncomfortable pre-teens, and it feels more like a limitation of the writer rather than a defect of the characters themselves.
During combat however, the game gets the occasional moment to shine with some more chaotic and poetic prose. For example, in one scene my character (Luna-terra) was getting ready to fight a girl she knew and had double-crossed in the past (Pluto). Luna-terra first sees Pluto’s ship and thinks this:
This is already a thousand times more interesting then the lines of incomprehensible lore or tween texting that came before it, but then it turns into a swirling sensual robot ballet fight, equal parts erotic and combative.
Then they break down and start tearing up each other’s ships while trying to expunge their anger and love for eachother and get back to fighting. Suddenly I’m on board. The visual of two massive robots engaging in political conflict, swirling in gunfire while they dig into their feelings is exactly what I want from a game like this.
This is someone’s favorite game. Someone combed through these documents, parsed through the conflict and came out the otherside understanding everything. They read between the lines and found out what makes our characters less than human. They were able to flesh out the war that led to this three way stalemate. They got swept up in artful robot ballet sex along the way and got an experience only this game could give them.
This game was not made for me. I think it has sleek interface design, interestingly industrial sound/music, and a whole heap of ambition. I also think it has a lot of sub-par dialogue, and not enough tangible lore for me to hang on to. This is the type of game that changed some thirteen year old’s life, and inspired a lot of their early art. They probably look back on it fondly, even as they move past it.
I will not play this game again, but I think it’s doing a good thing, sittin’ there being inspiring and ambitious. I wish all games I didn’t like had this much stuff that I liked.
Recommend: I have watched Evangelion, yes I see the parallels, I just didn’t know where to put that info. Don’t @ me like “lol this guy hasn’t even watched Evangel-” I’VE WATCHED IT OKAY, I JUST DIDN’T MENTION IT IN THE REVIEW! Yes, in fact, I HAVE seen The End of Evangelion also, why would you assume I hadn’t? You know, it’s gatekeeping assholes like you who give anime a bad name and make the whole thing-
Replay Percentage Chance: 1.5%
Time Played: 1.5 Hours
Skeeter’s Take:
Look, Heaven Will Be Mine was never going to win me over. Its core gameplay mechanic is “reading” and I average about 1 book per year (on a good year), and have never been a big fan of visual novels for the same reasons. And Heaven Will Be Mine is essentially a sci-fi picture book. It’s a pretty well made picture book, I’ll give it that. There’s enough FromSoftware hard-to-follow type lore and some crazy robot bodies or something, I don’t really know - I sort of got lost during the “Journal Entry World Exposition Dump”:
Look at all that! There was so much information being thrown at me that I was having such a hard time following what all of this was setting up - I had a general gist of “humanity in the stars”, some extremely vague “Existential Threat”, but even now having played further into the game, I don’t think I could tell you much outside of that.
For example, look at this section - I’ve underlined the “In-universe” lingo in red.
Besides running on long enough to rival one of my sentences (without the parentheticals), there is so much being thrown at me here. Ship-Self? “String of Pearls” sort of sounds like a sex thing, and it’s our 69th day, so that’s kind of funny. Lunar Gravity Well? What? My best tool in these situations is letting it all bounce off, see what I can absorb, and hope that it all starts making sense later. It feels similar to the first time I watched Game of Thrones. A million ideas, conflicts, geographic areas, and characters are thrown at you right from the start and it is so confusing. But they are existing in an already established world, and the viewer is expected to slowly learn and absorb the world over time. If I were to go back and watch the first season of GOT again, I’m sure I would be able to immediately follow along as I’m already familiar with the world. I think of this as a sign of good world building, normally.
And I know the devs aren’t Hollywoo(d) writers, and I’m not going to extend the Game of Thrones example further than the world building, but it didn’t quite click in Heaven Will Be Mine.
There’s clearly a lot of lore and world building (and probably time) put into this game. There’s clearly an established world with its own weird rules and interactions complete with separate conflicting factions and weird robot-body spaceships integrated with the user’s soul (I think?). I’m sure with more time, everything on that journal page might make sense, but part of the problem for me lies in giving it to the player through a journal page at the very start of the game.
I’m sorry - did I say “a journal page”? I meant to say, “Three separate journal pages”:
There’s a short character intro before these journal pages that I feel does a much better job setting things up without all this background information. You learn a little about your character, how they interact, what faction they are from, and a little information about the robot ship-body you’ll soon be piloting.
That’s enough to hook me! I don’t need to then be given a huge dump of information about the brewing battle between intergalactic factions via three separate faction journal entries! Let me find that out by playing the game! Instead of being intrigued, trying to piece together this new world via characters interaction, set pieces, etc. I found myself trying desperately to remember what side of the conflict the Memorial Foundation Native Sphere Existential Safety fell on, and what (or where) the hell a “Lunar Gravity Well” was. To me, it turned the joy of discovery into the chore of remembering. I know I’m nitpicking a bit here, but I feel that these small details matter more in a good game, which I can tell Heaven will be Mine is, even if it’s not to my tastes. It’s sort of like a few scratches on a really nice car - they’re going to stand out and when someone notices them, they’re naturally going to ask “what happened here?”.
And sometimes that car has an ugly paint job.
So, I picked the character Saturn and boy howdy, I was not a big fan of Saturn. Saturn and I probably wouldn’t hang out in real life. Perhaps that’s the point of Saturn. I think Saturn is supposed to be the charming rogue - a “Han Solo” type that uses humor to deflect her feelings, does some morally gray things, but ultimately has her heart in the right place. She steals a robot in the beginning and defers from the military (or whatever is akin here), which I think further supports my theory.
Instead of charming she comes off more as horndog edgy teen - I get it, she’s going through a phase, but please phase me out of it!
I’ll give you an example.
Here are some of Saturn’s text logs:
I only played two in-game days, so I don’t have much information to pull from. Maybe things change over time. However, I found it absurd how Saturn found every opportunity to turn the topic to titillation. It was annoying at first, but found it progressively more hilarious over time. I don’t think I found them funny in the intended way, but hey, they got a laugh.
I also found Saturn’s morals and motives hard to follow, which might be intentional. Even if she ends up developing and showing who she really is later, I still need something to latch onto to make me want to root for her. Well, something besides “overly-flirtatious” and “sex joke”.
I think that’s a good way to summarize how I feel about Heaven Will Be Mine - I’m a big ol’ fat, fleshy, juicy, bone-free fish and there ain’t no damn hooks here to catch me Glub glub glub
(those are fish noises)
Recommend:Art Cool, Sound Cool, Worldbuilding Cool. Reading? Statistically UNCOOL. I read it in a magazine, which doesn’t technically count as reading, so nice try h8rs. I’m sure someone would like this. Hell this might be someone’s favorite game. I don’t think I know that person, but if you’re out there reading this and thought this seemed like something you would like, let us know in the comments! And don’t forget to emoji react to the review and subscribe for more EPIC reviews.
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Replay Percentage Chance: 69%
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Time Played: 1 hour
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