A few months ago, The Game Bakers studio (makers of Furi, among others), announced a game called Haven as a game to “play solo or co-op with a special someone”. The preliminary footage showed two interracial lovers (who roughly match my wife and I) holding hands and gliding around a colorful planet. We were sold, even though we knew the game wouldn’t come out until sometime in 2020.
Well, with The Game Awards came The Steam Games Festival, where several developers put up demos of their upcoming games that you could play for 48 hours before they would be gone. One of these games was Haven, and I instantly downloaded it so my wife and I could give it a try. After playing through it, it’s exactly what we were hoping it would be.
Haven starts with the two main characters inside the “nest”, the spaceship that took them to the planet they’re on. They appear to be on the run from something, though the exact details are unclear. It will be interesting to see whether the game explains more once it actually comes out, or if it will start in the same way that the demo does. Regardless, it’s an instantly compelling narrative that captures the relationship between the two characters extremely well.
When you go outside the nest, the objectives of the game start becoming more clear. There are several islets of the planet you have found refuge on, and most of these islets are covered in “rust”. You can clear away this rust by gliding or walking over it with your special boots, giving this game something of an environmental vibe.
This environmental message extends into the combat. When we first ran into creatures and started combat, I felt bad, because I didn’t necessarily want to fight any creatures. However, it soon became clear that you’re not killing these creatures, but you’re instead cleansing them of the same rust hurting the planet, and once they are cleansed they can roam free in the wild again. It feels something like Pokemon, with creatures that don’t actually die and combat that ultimately isn’t all that violent. By the way, the combat is live, not turn-based, but it feels pretty accessible overall.
Anyways, the demo was unfortunately pretty short, and it was only for one player (we took turns switching off with the gamepad). However, it checked off pretty much everything we were hoping the game would have. It had quiet moments of intimacy, but the gameplay outside of the nest was exciting and felt thematically fitting.
The full game is going to have drop-in/drop-out co-op, meaning you can easily play solo or with a second player depending on what you’re looking for from that gaming session. Of course, my wife and I plan to play through the entire game together. We have had a lot of fun co-op experiences, from Divinity: Original Sin 2 to A Hat In Time, but Haven seems like a game tailor-made for us in a way that no game before it has been. The demo absolutely sold us on it, and we will be patiently counting down the months until we can finally play through the whole game.
