Heaven Will Be Mine and choice in games
I beat my first game of 2022, and it’s a good one.
There’s a lot I could praise in Heaven Will Be Mine. The music, the art, the writing, the UI. All of it is very, very good. But the thing that impressed me most about the game was how well it managed player choices.
At the start of the game, the player chooses one of three pilots to follow, but from there the story can still reach any of their factions’ respective endings. What ultimately decides the outcome of a playthrough is in each chapter/day of the story, the player choosing which direction the pilot’s actions will take. This isn’t unique on a purely mechanical level. It’s pretty common these days to put stock in player choices, and to let there be multiple endings to stories. But no other game I’ve played has done it so well.
It’s incredibly difficult to write a story and characters in such a way that they are both good and also malleable enough for the player to control their actions. Think about your Fallouts and your Skyrims and all those sorts of games, and ask yourself what kind of person the player character is? What do they like? What do they think of the world? How do they go about expressing themselves? In the end there’s no right answer here. It’s however you play them. And that’s perfectly fine for the kind of game that they are, but when the main character can’t be given any kind of their own personality, it massively undercuts the dev’s ability to create a compelling story. So then how do you balance this? How does the player have choice and agency within a deep and compelling story?
Honestly, for a long time I didn’t think it was possible. I’ve complained about there being too much emphasis placed on player choice in games for quite a while. And I’ve seen games try (and fail) to have both. I remember playing Assassin’s Creed Odyssey and being frustrated by the way they seemingly let you play Kassandra as a self insert 90% of the time, but would then decide on various outcomes the other 10%. For instance, the pretty well publicized controversy behind letting you play her as a lesbian, but the game deciding that narratively she has to have a kid with a man. (Also, ok, I don’t usually go for this kind of game to begin with, but listen, as far as self inserts go, a buff lesbian was a pretty compelling one).
But, for all of this, I think I was wrong to see player choice and strong characterization as being mutually exclusive, because Heaven Will Be Mine has proven that they’re not, and that they just have to be balanced carefully.
In HWBM, even though you choose the outcome of each interaction, the characters are still given enough space in which to act as their own people. You can alter their trajectory, guiding their orbit, but not reverse it entirely. No matter the outcome, each action they take fits their characterization perfectly, to the point where it’s not hard to forget that these are choices that you made from the start, but the fact that you had a hand in it draws you into the story beautifully. And each outcome is still meaningfully different, each ending memorable and distinct (and if you enjoy one, I would encourage you to seek out and experience the others). And it does all this so well that I’m left reconsidering my thoughts on player choice in games entirely. Yes, HWBM is a visual novel, so applying it to other types of games would bring about other sorts of challenges. But for the first time in ages I’m actually interested in games exploring this, and want to seek out other games that do it well. If you have any suggestions, I’d be happy to hear them.