Heaven Will Be Mine's predecessor, We Know the Devil, resonated with me even though I'm a cishet dude because of how it intersected grappling with religion and finding one's identity as a teen, which I heavily struggled with all those lifetimes ago. Heaven Will Be Mine did not really give me any sort of emotional peg to hang on to, as it leans even more heavily into queer narratives. And while I've enjoyed a handful of mecha anime, I wouldn't really say I'm a big fan of the genre.
Still, I mostly enjoyed my 5 and a half hours with it, playing as all three characters and seeing all the endings.
To start things off, the writing is dense.
There's the literal plot where humans discovered an alien "existential" threat from outer space in the late 50s and started a military space program that, you guessed it, trained child mech pilots that would fight the threat, but then that threat turned out to be not much of a threat after all, and now it's this alternative 80s cold war and the forces sent to fight that threat have split into three factions with different ideologies regarding humanity's direction toward space travel.
There's all the interpersonal histories between the three protagonists and the supporting cast. Then there's all this sci-fi philosophizing over concepts like gravity and Culture with a capital C and othering and war, which also periodically bleeds into a metanarrative.
And it's all delivered in different modes of text doled out in a not-so-strictly chronological manner in chats, emails, letters, archives, quotes, and psychic dialogues written in prose that swings confidently from cheeky flirtation to inscrutable jargon to emotional outbursts to metaphors galore.
Heaven Will Be Mine is so very difficult to try to sum up, and it feels so very much intentional how it refuses to be recognized as just one familiar thing or a set of familiar things to be neatly categorized. It is a game about human bodies feeling more human in their robot ship-selves where they can express themselves more freely in space, where Earth's flattening gravity doesn't quite exert as much force. I couldn't quite relate to the messy interlocking relationships between Pluto and Luna-Terra and Saturn and Mercury and Mars and Europa, but I understood their fears and desires.
There is so much poetry to the action/romance/sex scenes that even with the static, impressionistic art, I felt every shot, every thrust, every near miss, and every collision. The choreography actually might be my favorite writing in the game as a sensory experience.
The music and how it moves to the rhythm of every scene makes my head pound and my heart swell. The deep bass, the ethereal synths, the unrelenting percussion, the ear-splitting glitch noises are sensual, debilitating, melancholic, and uplifting. It's a powerful soundtrack.
The UI that resembles what you would think of as a mecha's HUD and the beeps and buzzes that play when you interface with it is ~immersive~.
Coming into this after the fairly straightforward, more emotionally driven narrative of We Know the Devil and hearing how this game has been advertised as simply a "flirty lesbian mecha visual novel", I was not expecting Heaven Will Be Mine to be quite the layered text that is as interested in exploring metaphysical concepts as it is in getting queer women to make out with each other. It's one of the few games where I've had to actually stop and reread lines to make sure I understood what was being said, and not because it's written poorly, but because theory, metaphor, personal and world history, and subtext and meanings constantly converge. I'm coming out of this feeling a bit emotionally detached but a lot more intellectually stimulated. I don't love it, but I think it's a challenging work that deserves focused attention.
Still, I mostly enjoyed my 5 and a half hours with it, playing as all three characters and seeing all the endings.
To start things off, the writing is dense.
There's the literal plot where humans discovered an alien "existential" threat from outer space in the late 50s and started a military space program that, you guessed it, trained child mech pilots that would fight the threat, but then that threat turned out to be not much of a threat after all, and now it's this alternative 80s cold war and the forces sent to fight that threat have split into three factions with different ideologies regarding humanity's direction toward space travel.
There's all the interpersonal histories between the three protagonists and the supporting cast. Then there's all this sci-fi philosophizing over concepts like gravity and Culture with a capital C and othering and war, which also periodically bleeds into a metanarrative.
And it's all delivered in different modes of text doled out in a not-so-strictly chronological manner in chats, emails, letters, archives, quotes, and psychic dialogues written in prose that swings confidently from cheeky flirtation to inscrutable jargon to emotional outbursts to metaphors galore.
Heaven Will Be Mine is so very difficult to try to sum up, and it feels so very much intentional how it refuses to be recognized as just one familiar thing or a set of familiar things to be neatly categorized. It is a game about human bodies feeling more human in their robot ship-selves where they can express themselves more freely in space, where Earth's flattening gravity doesn't quite exert as much force. I couldn't quite relate to the messy interlocking relationships between Pluto and Luna-Terra and Saturn and Mercury and Mars and Europa, but I understood their fears and desires.
There is so much poetry to the action/romance/sex scenes that even with the static, impressionistic art, I felt every shot, every thrust, every near miss, and every collision. The choreography actually might be my favorite writing in the game as a sensory experience.
The music and how it moves to the rhythm of every scene makes my head pound and my heart swell. The deep bass, the ethereal synths, the unrelenting percussion, the ear-splitting glitch noises are sensual, debilitating, melancholic, and uplifting. It's a powerful soundtrack.
The UI that resembles what you would think of as a mecha's HUD and the beeps and buzzes that play when you interface with it is ~immersive~.
Coming into this after the fairly straightforward, more emotionally driven narrative of We Know the Devil and hearing how this game has been advertised as simply a "flirty lesbian mecha visual novel", I was not expecting Heaven Will Be Mine to be quite the layered text that is as interested in exploring metaphysical concepts as it is in getting queer women to make out with each other. It's one of the few games where I've had to actually stop and reread lines to make sure I understood what was being said, and not because it's written poorly, but because theory, metaphor, personal and world history, and subtext and meanings constantly converge. I'm coming out of this feeling a bit emotionally detached but a lot more intellectually stimulated. I don't love it, but I think it's a challenging work that deserves focused attention.