Heaven Will Be Mine

My first instinct when I loaded Heaven Will Be Mine was that this thing was written for someone, specifically, and that someone is not every person on Steam. That is not a warning. That is a recommendation. Writer Aevee Bee and artist Mia Schwartz built this out of the DNA of their prior cult title We Know the Devil, but the ambitions here are bigger, stranger, and more openly confrontational with the form. The setting is an alternate 1981. Humanity built Ship-Selves, giant mecha that merge neurologically with their pilots, to fight an existential alien threat that turned out to be mostly imaginary. Now Earth wants everyone home and three factions are in a cold standoff over the fate of space colonists. You pick one of three pilots, each with her own faction alignment and her own Ship-Self: Luna-Terra, the scarred veteran ace in the battered Mare Crisium; Pluto, the engineered psychic princess piloting the time-bending Krun Macula; and Saturn, the hacker-hijacker who absconded with the experimental String of Pearls and seems more interested in flirting than in the war. The structure runs across eight in-game days, each offering two missions. At the end of every mission sits a binary choice marked "Loyal" or "Betray" - you can prosecute your faction's goals or let feelings get in the way. A tracker between missions shows exactly which faction you are pushing toward dominance. There is no fail state. The game is designed for you to make bad decisions, and it respects that. Interactivity is minimal by any traditional measure. This is a text-first experience. But the craft applied to every surrounding layer is the argument for why that works. Alec Lambert's soundtrack drifts between lo-fi minimal synth and something closer to power electronics, hypnotic in a way that makes the screen feel pressurized. The UI leans into a retro communications-monitor aesthetic, all scanlines and signal noise, and it gives the act of reading text an unusual physicality. The art style is zinester-influenced rather than conventionally anime, and the mech designs reflect the interior lives of their pilots rather than functioning as cool-robot spectacle. Some players will find the abstract visual language of the combat sequences frustrating if they want to see the action rendered literally. That is a fair critique. The game asks you to let the prose carry the weight of those scenes. The writing is where the real division happens. Community reception skews very positive, with Steam showing a 92% approval rate across hundreds of reviews, and it earned a spot on several year-end best-of lists for 2018. Critics who love it point to the philosophical weight it carries around identity, self-determination, and what it means to belong somewhere, and to someone. Critics who bounce off it call the prose abstract to the point of opacity, and that is also accurate. A single playthrough runs roughly ten hours. All three routes together can stretch toward thirty if you read everything, including the in-world chat logs and emails that build out the lore sideways. The endings across routes share thematic conclusions rather than wildly divergent rewards, so completionist pressure is low. Play your pilot, see it through, replay as a different character only if you genuinely want a second angle. This is a small, careful, hand-assembled thing from a team that knows exactly what it is making and who it is making it for. It does not hedge. If the idea of an ideologically dense queer mecha romance where the most important choice is whether to kiss your rival or betray your faction sounds like exactly your kind of bad decision, it probably is.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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