Haven

With a wholesome vibe and some simple mechanics, Haven is a cozy game that celebrates friendship and love. Successful at developing its central relationship, the game is only occasionally hampered by an overall lack of obstacles and conflict: things here can be just too nice.

Haven is about two runaway lovers, Yu and Kay, who have managed to escape together in Yu’s small spaceship to a faraway planet called Source, which is divided into small floating islets connected by magic bridges. But there’s no such thing as an easy time in life, so after an earthquake, their ship is badly damaged, leading the couple to search the planet for parts that can help Yu repair it.

The narrative handles exposition very well, drip-feeding us information about their lives with dialogues that briefly touch upon what they are running from and how their homeworld operated. The writing has a great “show, don’t tell” approach when it comes to the personality of the central characters: we can already guess that Kay is a biologist – or something of the sort – long before his past profession is mentioned just by observing the enthusiastic way in which he comments about the fauna and flora of Source.

Yu and Kay are basically the only characters in the game, so their relationship is at the heart of the story. They’re young people in love, the Romeo and Juliet who succeeded in running away together, which means that their dynamic is full of energy, spirited banter, erotic tension, and romantic declarations: “I’d rather endure a thousand earthquakes than risk being away from you,” one of them says after that fateful earthquake hits them.

They mean the whole world to each other, and the fact that they’re together is the only thing that really matters for them. They’re desperately in love, in other words, which is reflected in the way their conversations usually go: “I have good news,” Kay tells Yu at the beginning, when asked about the planet’s characteristics, “I love you.” The writing perfectly captures the passionate energy of youthful love, making Yu and Kay seem perpetually locked in a honeymoon phase, when even the action of talking about mundane stuff, like doing push-ups, becomes the perfect opportunity to playfully flirt with each other.

Yu and Kay, of course, don’t lose a single opportunity to have sex: when they are role-playing to pass the time, for example, pretending to lead a revolution back home (see how we get to understand their society through indirect means?), the role-play quickly gains erotic connotations that, in turn, naturally evolve to a lot of… physical interaction, you know, the nice kind.

When they’re talking about food, they find a way to flirt; when they’re talking about Source, they flirt; when they are commenting about a strange magazine they found, they flirt; and when they are discussing about the strange creatures they came across, yes, they flirt: it’s repetitive, no doubt, but the repetition is kind of the point here. Let Yu and Kay be happy: you know that stage in a relationship where you can’t stop saying “I love you” to your partner each time you see them smile; when lying down by their side soothes your heart and makes you sleep like an angel; when your annoying quirks and issues are still just amusing to them instead of a constant source of headache? In that terrible, fateful “still” lies the rub, but *sounds of tears being suppressed* let’s move on because Yu and Kay are right there, at their prime, living their best life.

Haven’s narrative is mainly built on the couple’s interactions with one another. Sleeping, eating, cooking, exploring, almost every action in the game makes them talk about all sorts of things. Yu may complain that Kay made her side of the bed “too sticky,” (too much info, I know), or Kay may become annoyed that he can’t find an important ring, fearing that he lost it in one of Source’s islets. They also frequently talk about their past lives – which are a puzzle we’re to put together – commenting about their decision to run away and if they have any regrets about it.

The couple, of course, suffers from some moments of insecurity – passing through that common “I don’t deserve you” stage of a relationship that, if you’re anything like me, never ended – but more often than not they display a great deal of optimism regarding their dire situation, an optimism that can be touching in its desperateness: they have to remain optimistic because they’re alone in an alien planet together. There’s no one forbidding their love in Source, but also no one to turn to for help in an emergency. They can’t afford to fight with each other, to be pissed off for too long, and even consider other options. They decided to be together, and so now they must face the consequences of that decision.

But this leads us to the problematic part of the Haven: it lacks obstacles that push Yu and Kay to their limits. After their ship is damaged in the earthquake, they begin to explore the planet for parts, but nothing interesting happens while they do that: there are almost no events that test their love or trust in one another, nothing remarkable to, just like that earthquake, shake them to their foundations. They remain steadfast, understanding, and empathetic, taking great care of each other. It’s indeed great to watch a healthy relationship unfold, for once, but the narrative doesn’t offer anything to cover for the lack of internal drama. There’s always the promise that whatever they are running from will suddenly appear and tear them apart, but this part of the story comes too late in the game to have any impact.

It’s almost at the end of Haven that Yu and Kay have their first fight, too, which leads to a great moment reminiscent of Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, when the controls make us feel the absence of one of the characters: the game splits their actions to each side of the controller, so when one of them is suddenly gone, half of our controller also ceases to function. The way we interact with Haven’s world becomes incomplete when Yu and Kay are apart, and that’s beautiful: it’s the physical controller being turned into an integral part of the narrative experience. It’s great and heartbreaking when it happens… but my point is that the game could have used more moments like that during the middle part.

The gameplay in Haven, after all, is not its strongest suit. Technically, it’s a turn-based RPG, since when we find creatures in Source, we’re transported to a battle screen where Yu, Kay, and the monsters take turns attacking each other. We control Kay with the left part of the controller, Yu with the right, and we have four options available: use a melee attack, a ranged one, defend, and “pacify” fallen enemies, lest they come back to fight again.

In Haven, we don’t kill the creatures we find, but “pacify” them by removing the strange red crust that is turning them aggressive. This is fundamental to the “wholesome” vibe of the game, as gratuitous violence is not encouraged, celebrated, or rewarded in any way: Yu and Kay fight only to save the very creatures they are battling against.

Enemy design is great in the way it pushes us to think about which action to use – and against which monster. There are enemies that are only weak to ranged attacks and enemies only weak to melee attacks; there are enemies that change forms, switching their weaknesses; and enemies that become vulnerable only after they land a blow on us – which makes the “defend” action actually useful; a very rare thing in RPGs.

And Yu and Kay can defend not only themselves, but also each other (which thematically is * chef’s kiss *), so it’s a common strategy to make one use a shield while the other prepares to attack the soon-to-be-vulnerable monster. And, if they both use the same attack at the same time, they unleash a more powerful version of it, encouraging the player to make Yu and Kay work together. But the game could have gone a step further and made the main characters have different stats and proficiencies – one being better at melee than the other, for example – to shake things up and make the decision process more complex. The issue with Haven’s combat is precisely the fact that being too simple makes battles feel a bit repetitive after a while, as they all tend to unfold similarly.

The other side of the game is exploration, which could have also been improved on. Yu and Kay’s goal is to search for parts to restore their ship and, luckily for them, there was once an attempt to colonize their planet, so there are abandoned buildings and installations everywhere. But the planet’s islets all share the same look, containing just some slopes, blue grass, and one or two tall mountains, which makes them blur together after a while. A few more landmarks would have gone a long way in helping to make the environments stand out a bit more and make exploration more engaging.

The map function, then, is not useful but necessary to navigate Source effectively, as it’s easy to get lost if we’re only using the environment to guide ourselves. One thing that aggravates this problem is that we can’t see which islet connects with the one we’re currently in without the map: there’s a flow bridge (a bridge made of blue energy) that leads us out of the islet, but there’s no visual indication of where we’re going to end up. This makes Source feel a bit disjointed and confusing, which is a shame.

And then we arrive at the flow threads: blue lines in the air that extend themselves as we ride them to an unknown destination. The first mistake here is making these lines recharge our “batteries”: the islets in Source are tainted with rust – the same red crust that makes animals go feral – that can be removed by just hovering over them with Yu and Kay, which consumes their “flow,” which we must recharge by riding these flowlines. So, to clean the planet of the ever-consuming rust, we must keep riding these magical blue threads everywhere. The problem, however, is that this is a boring process: we can find a thread everywhere and just go back and forth over it to recharge the couple’s batteries. These flow threads would have been great if they were instead rare occurrences that guided us to unexpected places; in other words, if they were intrinsically tied to exploration and always led to some new discovery. But, alas, they’re everywhere and serve as busywork.

Exploration would also have benefited from a more interesting setting. Source has too few secrets up its sleeve story-wise – its backstory is kind of irrelevant in the end – and there are too few secret areas to find as well. It’s a wonderful moment when we discover a beach in a certain islet, which leads to some great scenes between Yu and Kay: Haven should have had more of these moments and less of floating over random blue lines that lead us nowhere.

Especially because the game is full of nice touches that help build its wholesome atmosphere. When exploring, we can either control Yu or Kay and alternate between them with the press of a button, but while we’re flying with one of them, the other can join up and start flying together… holding hands. It’s cute. And if we stand still for a while, they will embrace or kiss, which… recovers their health. Double cute. Their ship, meanwhile, is called “the Nest”, making it sound like the warm, sex-filled place that it is, and they curse with the word “Bloot!” which is, well, triple cute.

Haven, then, is an unusual RPG in the sense that it ditches the usual “end-of-the-world stakes” so typical of its genre to focus on a love story, with a great pair of main characters and some interesting ideas. It has its good share of problems, of course, but isn’t there at the core of any healthy relationship the realization that no one’s perfect?

July 16, 2025.

Review originally published on January 22, 2021.