The abilities are fun but man Hard Mode is ass. Like you're getting comfy but then OH NO THE DARK YARN ENEMY IS HERE BETTER CHANGE THE MUSIC UNTIL IT DIES only for it to happen again 20 seconds later.

and beating every level at full health is required for completion, so that Tank level with the meteors becomes extra frustrating since it amounts to luck whether you get hit or not.

Other than that it's Kirby's Epic Yarn but they tried too hard to address the complaints.

installing flesh augmentations to mine biocoins by drilling hundreds of holes into your teeth and filling the holes with Walmart™'s Biomass Filler®. getting hired to use your skullgun on the owner of a ski resort by his children. extremely pornographic ultra hyper suck and fucks. grapple with your appendix. the CEO mindset. stripping the organs from the residents of suburbanite households to sell on the stock market. the 640x480 resolution gifted to us by God. mass-produced sex slaves bred to serve their corporate overlords who can only scream and be fucked. teeth with teeth with teeth, take a bite.

PREFACE (AND FUCK YOU CHANDLER)

In case yall weren’t aware I rambled about this a bit on a list you can find here: https://www.backloggd.com/u/GutterTrash/list/me-attempting-to-read-heaven-will-be-mine/ I’m gonna make as much effort to not just repeat my immediate thoughts from there on here, so check that if you want more loose, scattershot immediate thoughts on it. Spoiler: It’s very negative. Once again, thank you Chandler for buying me this as a Christmas gift. Definitely the greatest gift I received.

This review is solely of the Saturn route, along with the MF ending. I am not going through any of the other routes, you can’t make me.

I WAS BASICALLY NEVER GOING TO LIKE THIS

I don’t need to tell you that I don’t go into a game wanting to hate it. That’s dumb, hating shit is obviously cringe and liking stuff is based. We know this. But, being completely frank, I couldn’t imagine a world in which I liked this. I don’t like VNs. I don’t care much for sci-fi. I don’t enjoy mecha shit. I prefer my narratives about sexuality more erotic than sensual. I am not a lesbian. Or a woman, for that matter.

But hey, I’ve liked stuff that falls into basically all of these categories before. Shit could still be banging despite all the immediate red flags. So ignoring all of that, I dove into it.

THIS IS BORING AS HELL

Above everything else, Heaven Will Be Mine is dull. That’s the real issue with it above anything else. For something made for a visual medium it’s very striking how little it does to maintain your attention. Every character gets something in the range of 3 portraits that they cycle through, which are placed weirdly off-center and far from each other, leading to almost every shot having a weirdly large amount of empty space. There are more CGs dedicated to showing two of the main characters kiss than to convey any sense of action. The game will bookend chapters with full on essays of white text on an empty black background, a la Watchmen (But whoever wrote these is nowhere near as fiery or engaging a writer as Alan Moore, which is why he could get away with that). Between missions you’re dumped with email upon email of some schmuck bloviating about random stuff with little cohesive feeling. This is to say nothing of the actual art at hand, which ranges from interestingly abstract at the best of times, but more often than not feels like the most generic queer artystyle imaginable.

I don’t get how they dropped the ball this hard when it comes to something as base level as “maintaining someone’s interest.” This admittedly comes from a cursory glance, but they seemed to have no trouble with that when it came to their previous game, We Know the Devil. That games usage of real photographs as background art is more visually striking and interesting than every single design choice in this game. A lack of visual interest is a common issue I have with most VNs, but this one in particular gives me absolutely nothing to latch onto. It leaves me little reason to analyze the contents of what I’m reading when it’s presented with so little panache. I get there’s certain things you can only do in games, namely the whole diverging paths and multiple routes thing, but most of this felt like it would be much better suited for a short story if so little is going to be done to make anything look good.

HEAVEN WILL BE OURS - A SATURN/PLUTO/LUNA-TERRA SLASHFIC

This is admittedly a harder idea to get across than “thing is boring”, but have you ever read something and it just kind of felt like it was written like fanfiction? That sort of very plain language, the relatively basic character writing (as if it was someone’s simplification of another person’s characters, almost), how gay everything is (Not that there’s anything wrong with that, obviously), how things just kind of…happen, for lack of a better word. It all screams “Queer AO3 Fanfic” to me.

Basically this is my fancy way of simplifying all the issues I have with the game’s writing under a common umbrella. Saturn, my protagonist, is a 2013-era Tumblr user's wet dream. She’s boisterous, she’s loud, she’s impulsive, she’s annoying, she’s the exact kind of character in all these tenderqueer lesbian stories who I can’t stand. Until, all of a sudden, she just kind of stops being annoying and decides to be a well spoken, non impulsive badass who occasionally says a quip or two. While this character change is definitely welcome, it comes way too out of nowhere for it to really have any kind of good impact. The other characters sure do exist. Outside of Mercury I have very little to say and even less to praise about any of them.

The structure of the story feels incredibly disjointed. As I said earlier, things just sort of happen in a kind of random order. It feels like there’s very little escalation from one mission to the next. Every one of them also ends really abruptly, they very rarely reach any actual kind of conclusion and just cut from two people ending a conversation to another one of those great black screens with white text on them. Repeat for eight missions and then the entire game just kind of ends very abruptly.

THE PARTS I LIKED

The chat logs were fine! At first they started out as Saturn being an unfunny comedian and Mercury being an annoying straight man (In a comedic sense, he’s actually a homo like everyone else), but later on I did actually get invested in the two’s interpersonal drama and greater discussions on love and agency and such. The much more conversational tone suits the writing a lot better to me.

I liked the ending decently enough too. I don’t really wanna go into it because I wanna keep this as spoiler free as possible, but it was a much more interesting part to the story than the entire rest of the game. Also the song that played during it was the only good song in the game. It was cool.

Also, it’s very easy to read. VNs often have issues with having the most flowery, dense purple prose in existence, and this was a major exception. This shit gave me absolutely zero trouble at least understanding what was going on and trying to be said. Too bad the presentation did everything in its power to make up for that.

TL;DR

Ultimately, did I enjoy Heaven Will Be Mine? No. Do I regret reading it, though? Yeah, probably. Though it’s not without any merit, Heaven Will Be Mine is a dull, often styleless and turgid piece on human relationships or whatever other abstract ideas you can pull from it, and I would recommend staying away from it unless you already know that you would like it.

Four out of ten because I’m giving it a large benefit of the doubt in that a lot of my issues were just the game in particular not resonating with me.