With under 24 hours left in this year’s Steam Autumn Sale, you’ve got under a day to get over that decision paralysis and pick up any of this year's award contenders or those games that have been collecting dust on your wish list. While there are plenty of games to choose from, one that should be on your radar is Heaven Will Be Mine. This queer visual novel about mech pilots is a great entry into visual novels for newcomers — and one of the best (and weirdest) mech games around. Now 70% off at a price of $3.74, Heaven Will Be Mine is a deal you can’t miss.
Heaven Will Be Mine is a lot of things. It tells an alternate history set in the 1980s where mankind is forced to team up and travel to the stars, due to the arrival of an eldritch space horror, leading eventually to three separate space-faring factions dominating our skies. Mech lovers, you get to play as a pilot, controlling a merch called “Ship-Self.” And finally, it is horny. Like really horny. Heaven Will Be Mine is all about the intense sexual desires that each pilot has and their efforts to relieve those tensions.
At a glance, Heaven Will Be Mine is like Neon Genesis Evangelion. They both use the mech genre to unravel complex stories about military conflict and the toll it takes on the mech pilots who wage it, and each story is dripping with sexuality. Heaven Will Be Mine (like all the best mech stories) gets that the adrenaline of piloting a massive fighting machine can be uhhhhh.... hot as hell.
Turns out murders can’t fully relieve sexual tension, and these pilots sure do have a lot of dopamine firing in their brains from all the action they’re seeing. So, it follows that these pilots are incredibly thirsty for each other.
The plot of Heaven Will Be Mine is hard to wrap your head around. That’s why the game’s three protagonists exist, offering the player three different routes through the game in order to understand a bit more of what is actually going on. Yes, there is a space skirmish and horny mech pilots, but there is also that big existential threat to think about. Much like watching Evangelion, my best advice for playing Heaven Will Be Mine is to enjoy the ride and not think too much. Everything will click eventually but don’t force it. Just enjoy flirting with hot mech pilots while you also fight for space dominance.
Unlike other action-forward mech games like this year's Armored Core VI, Heaven Will Be Mine takes a more narrative-focused approach to its mechs — this is a visual novel, after all. Most of the mech pilots' time is not spent in high-stakes fights. Rather, they just sit in their mechs waiting for something to happen. If you were wondering what Raven got up to in between Armored Core VI missions, this answers that. Turns out that the pilots just think about everything. I mean it makes sense, they’ve certainly got a lot of free time, stewing inside their own brains as they sit inside their claustrophobic combat machines.
This is where Heaven Will Be Mine meditates the most on what it actually means to pilot a mech, and how the pilot connects to the machine they pilot. Remember the “Ship-Selves” that mechs call themselves? The writing of Heaven Will Be Mine shines in these moments, meditating on the melding of people and weapons in battle, the isolation of being a pilot, and how the only people who can truly understand the joys and horrors of piloting a Ship-Self are the few other pilots. That's why they are pulled to each other, for fighting and flirting.
Heaven Will Be Mine is a game with a little something for everyone. Mechs, space, alternate history, sexting! What more could you need? If you get one thing during the Autumn Steam Sale, it should be this one-of-a-kind visual novel.
