30 Haven PC, PS4, Switch
The maker of Furi breaks into romantic comedy
Developer/publisher | The Game Bakers
Format | PC, PS4, Switch
Origin | France
Release | 2020
Videogames excel at portraying combat, but can be famously hapless when it comes to romance. Often, this is because they treat love and sex as another kind of combat – a question of methodical attrition in the hope of a splattery finishing move. That’s the flavour of canoodling one might expect from The Game Bakers, developers of psychedelic boss rush experience Furi, but the studio’s forthcoming RPG Haven is a very different kind of game. Like the clearly influential Brothers: A Tale Of Two Sons, Haven puts you in charge of two characters at once – sci-fi castaways Yu and Kay, whose inputs are split between D-pad and face buttons during shared tasks, and controlled as one unit during exploration. Unlike Brothers, this is not a tragedy but a sexy romcom, albeit a romcom set on a smashed planetoid and featuring the occasional spat with a fungal lizard.
When we first meet Yu and Kay they’re about to do the dirty in their spaceship’s kitchen following a tiff about salad. Sadly, a power outage completely kills the ambience and obliges the pair to set forth into the sweeping, fractured landscapes beyond. Quite why Yu and Kay are marooned on this otherwise deserted world remains to be seen, but it’s evidently a turn-on, and that chemistry between them informs every action and animation in the game. Send Yu and Kay gliding down a slope – the pair sport zero-G boots, the better to sculpt the waving vegetation of hillsides plucked from the geography of Breath Of The Wild – and they’ll eventually link hands. Loiter on a rise and they’ll get round to smooching and snuggling up to watch the sunset.
It’s all rather lovely. It could also prove utterly unbearable after a couple of hours, but let’s not put the curmudgeon before
the horse. “We’ve always wanted to make a love story,” studio co-founder and executive producer Audrey Leprince begins. “My bet was that we could make a love story about everyday life an interesting game.” Stepping away from the pure action genre is a “big creative risk”, she acknowledges, but then again, The
A romcom set on a smashed planetoid and featuring the odd spat with a fungal lizard
Game Bakers doesn’t want to be remembered for any particular kind of game. “We needed a break from our development of Furi – that was really intense – and we also wanted to surprise players, because we could have done Furi 2, right? And it would have been improved, we could have fine-tuned the details that were not so perfect in Furi, but then, that’s what players were expecting.”
Haven plays like a mixture of visual novel, management sim and JRPG, but wears the trappings of these genres lightly, invoking them in the service of its love story rather than adopting them wholesale. The exploration aspect sees you coasting about small chunks of floating wilderness, scooping up lines of “flow” energy – used to power the cosmic bridges between areas, among other things – and searching for food. While the game’s world is a peaceful place, the appearance of a strange purple substance has driven certain of its creatures berserk.
These frenzied beasts must be “pacified”, not killed, in quasi-turn-based combat, which sees Yu and Kay throwing fireballs and roundhouse kicks when their action bars fill up, as in the vintage Final Fantasy games. There’s a certain puzzle-game rigour to the fighting – Kay might conjure a force shield while Yu readies a devastating blow, for instance, and some foes require specific tactics – but it exists less for itself as to further the intimacy between characters. The battles are awash with incidental dialogue, Yu and Kay calling each other’s shots, thanking each other for intercepting hits and yelling in alarm when one takes a fall. Leprince
styles fights a bonding activity, with levelups tied to timing-based tag-team attacks rather than the mere act of defeating a foe.
Haven’s stars are charismatically written and voiced, like Adam and Eve with a big dollop of Fire Emblem. Kay is softer, nerdier, the more laid-back of the two, while Yu is more playful and assertive to the point of recklessness. Confronted with an alien fruit, Kay proposes collecting samples for testing even as Yu pops one into her mouth, much to her partner’s horror.
If there’s often the sense of shepherding a pair of boisterous overgrown children, conversations back at their ship, the Nest, expose traces of darkness. During these interludes, you roam between chambers like an unobtrusive third flatmate, triggering cutscenes in which you pick responses for one character. One early scene sees Kay broaching the events that have caused the pair to seek refuge on a distant world, only for Yu to lose her temper. “FYI, you are the one who ruined the mood,” she fumes later, as the pair settle down to sleep. These scenes aside, the Nest is home to crafting tables, among other familiar roleplaying props, though this very much isn’t an experience in which you gather 20 pieces of wood to fashion a pitchfork. “It’s a very French game: you spend a lot of time cooking and chatting,” Leprince says. “But later on you will have other actions – you’ll be changing your outfits, you’ll be able to make equipment, you’ll be healing yourselves and making medicine.”
Haven’s unlikely yet elegant collection of elements from several genres is the result of much trial and error, she goes on. “We had a lot of trouble with this one. At first we were going for more like, gliding and drifting, more of a level designer’s experience, more thinking about figures and movements. It wasn’t satisfying, and then we moved the other way [and focused
on] storytelling. And then we finally came back to the gliding, brought the inspiration for that together with the RPG and story part. We came upon this idea that everything would revolve around the relationship – they’re always together and they do everything together – and it kind of clicked. It’s been a journey. We lost a year trying different things.”
Integral to Haven’s charm is that it’s about a mature relationship, not a courtship, which helps it sidestep the tendency of romances in games such as Dragon Age to become sidequests with a completion stat and some unlockable softcore to grease the wheels. It isn’t about getting the girl or boy you want but living with that person, tolerating their least sexy habits and growing old alongside them. One of the game’s most heartwarming sights is Yu and Kay asleep back at the Nest, kicking each other around the bed and stealing the blankets – a subconscious back-and-forth any couple will recognise. “It’s always about dating [in romance-themed games],” Leprince adds. “No-one’s ever really dared to do something like this, where you wake up next to somebody every day and they have salad stuck in their teeth, and you tell them you love them.”
“It’s a very French game: you spend a lot of time cooking and chatting”