Heaven Will Be Mine

There is a particular kind of indie game that arrives with no interest in being liked by everyone, and Heaven Will Be Mine is a purebred specimen. Released on Steam on July 25, 2018 and later ported to iOS, it’s the second collaboration between Worst Girls Games and Pillow Fight, the same creative unit behind the cult favorite We Know The Devil — writer Aevee Bee, artist Mia Schwartz, with an original score by Alec Lambert. That pedigree matters. We Know The Devil was a small, mean, beautiful thing about three teenagers at a summer camp; Heaven Will Be Mine is the same sensibility scaled up to the size of the solar system, and it keeps every ounce of the interpersonal cruelty and tenderness that made the first game work.

The setup is alternate history with teeth. In this 1980s, the space program never sputtered out after Apollo. Humanity went up and stayed up, built orbital infrastructure, and then — inconveniently — discovered that going to space is not the same as belonging there. Three factions now argue the point with mechs: the corporate Memorial Foundation, which wants everyone brought safely back down; the quasi-religious Cradle’s Graces, which wants transcendence; and the anarchic Celestial Mechanics, which wants to stay up and figure it out later. You get eight days. You pick a pilot. You watch the argument resolve.

Market-wise, this is not a mass product and never pretended to be. It sits in the same shelf as Butterfly Soup and Hypnospace Outlaw — the small-team, strong-authorial-voice tier where reception is measured in devotion rather than units. The iOS App Store carries a 5.0 rating from 29 ratings — a small sample, but one that describes a self-selecting audience that found exactly what it wanted.

• Three parallel campaigns, not three endings: You play Luna-Terra, Pluto, or Saturn through her entire eight-day arc. The routes intersect. Scenes that read as a victory from one cockpit read as a humiliation from another. The game is explicit that all three are meant to be played — this is a triptych, not a menu.
• Choices that set relationships, not outcomes: Decision points determine whether a rival pilot becomes a lover, an enemy, or something unresolved in between — and which faction’s vision for the human future actually wins. There’s no fail state, no combat system, no stat management. The branching is about what kind of person your pilot decides to be.
• In-fiction document archive: Between deployments you comb through emails, chat logs, corporate memos, and dossiers. This is where the worldbuilding actually lives; skip it and the plot becomes considerably harder to follow.
• Original synth score by Alec Lambert: Retro-futurist, warm, unhurried. It does an enormous amount of tonal work in a game with no animation to speak of.
• Stylized combat illustration: Static, high-contrast key art of mechs and pilots. Fewer assets than a AAA cutscene, deployed with far better judgment.

The Gameplay Loop

Let’s be honest about what this is, because the marketing won’t be: it’s reading. There is a decision point every fifteen or twenty minutes, an archive to browse between missions, and nothing else. No timers, no minigames, no resource management, no Persona-style calendar. If your definition of “game” requires a verb more active than choose, this will read as an illustrated novella with a soundtrack, and you’d be within your rights.

What that austerity buys is focus. Every choice in Heaven Will Be Mine is a relational choice. Do you let Pluto get close? Do you let Luna-Terra retreat behind her professionalism? The mech battles are the medium, not the message — two pilots hurling themselves at each other in vacuum is the game’s metaphor for flirtation, and it commits to that metaphor so completely that combat descriptions read like seduction and seduction reads like a duel. When it lands, it’s striking. Very few games make “I want to fight you” and “I want to know you” feel like the same sentence.

The Prose Problem

Here’s the wall, and everyone hits it. Aevee Bee writes in a register that’s abstract, allusive, and heavily jargoned. Characters discuss “the Existential Threat” and orbital metaphysics in dialogue that circles its subject rather than stating it. Sentences fold back on themselves. Technical terms get introduced without a glossary and load-bear immediately.

This is not accidental, and the game shouldn’t be graded as though it were sloppy. The obliqueness is doing thematic work: these are characters who cannot say what they mean, in an era that has no vocabulary yet for what they are. The prose withholds because they withhold. But intentional difficulty is still difficulty. The opening stretch is a cold open into a lexicon the player doesn’t have, and the game offers almost no scaffolding — no codex, no tooltip glossary, no “previously on.” The archive documents help, but they’re optional and unsignposted, which is a genuine design miss. A single in-line term reference would have cost the game nothing and rescued a meaningful chunk of the players who bounce off it early.

Push through and the payoff is real. By day four, the vocabulary clicks, and the density flips from obstacle to pleasure — the doubled meanings that were there the whole time start to surface.

Structure and Replay

The three-route design is the most sophisticated thing here. Each route is a substantial commitment for the genre, and a complete run means tripling it — front-loaded with the risk of finishing route one unsure whether route two is worth it. It is. The recontextualization is the point: Saturn’s flippancy reads completely differently once you’ve been inside Pluto’s head, and the faction politics only resolve into coherent argument when you’ve heard all three cases made sincerely. The game is structurally arguing that no single perspective is sufficient, and it makes you do the work to prove it.

The weakness is that this structure is poorly communicated in-product. Nothing tells a first-time player that finishing one route means they’ve seen roughly a third of the writing. Players who treat route one as “the game” walk away with a legitimately incomplete impression, and much of the “it’s too short” reaction reads like exactly that misunderstanding.

Content warnings are worth taking seriously: body horror, abuse, and trauma are handled directly and without cushioning. These are substantive rather than boilerplate.

The art direction is confident in a way that’s rarer than it should be in low-budget VNs. Rather than pretending to an animation budget it doesn’t have, the game leans into flat color, hard shapes, and heavy negative space — pilot portraits and mech illustrations that read like risograph prints or a very good 1980s OVA laserdisc sleeve. Backgrounds are minimal, often just gradient and starfield. It works because the restraint is consistent; nothing looks like a corner was cut, because there are no corners.

The UI is clean and gets out of the way — text box, name plate, choice list. That’s it. The archive interface between missions is the one rough edge: navigating documents is functional but joyless, a plain list where the fiction was practically begging for a period-appropriate terminal skin.

Performance should be a non-issue by design. It’s a 2D visual novel of modest scope — light on hardware, quick to load, with no meaningful technical footprint on either platform. Alec Lambert’s score deserves a separate mention — warm analog synth that carries the emotional weight the static art can’t, and one of the few VN soundtracks genuinely worth owning on its own.

Steam is the definitive version, mostly by default. Mouse-and-keyboard suits the reading rhythm, the archive documents are legible at full resolution, and having a second monitor for the inevitable “wait, who is the Memorial Foundation again” moment helps more than it should.

iOS is, counterintuitively, the better experience — with one caveat. Tap-to-advance is the correct input for this game; a thumb on glass is a lower-friction verb than a mouse click, and this is prose you want to read in bed or on a train rather than hunched at a desk. The 5.0 rating from 29 ratings is too small a sample to mean much statistically, but the enthusiasm tracks with the format fit. The caveat is the archive: dense in-fiction documents on a phone screen means more scrolling and more pinch-zooming than anyone wants, and on a smaller iPhone the dossiers become a chore rather than a reward. On iPad, that objection mostly disappears. Buy it on iOS if you’ll actually read it there; buy it on Steam if you want the documents to breathe.

Heaven Will Be Mine is a game that knows exactly who it’s for and declines to court anyone else. That’s both its greatest strength and the ceiling on its score. The writing is ambitious in ways that most games — indie or otherwise — simply don’t attempt: it uses genre furniture to argue about autonomy, embodiment, and who gets to decide what humanity is for, and it never once stops to explain the joke. When the prose clicks, the effect is exhilarating. When it doesn’t, it’s a wall of beautifully arranged words you can’t get purchase on.

We’d forgive the difficulty entirely if the game did more to help players over the initial hump. A glossary. A route-structure explainer on the title screen. Something. Those who bounce off it aren’t wrong about their experience, and a small amount of onboarding generosity would have converted a chunk of them without compromising a single sentence of the actual writing.

But that’s a critique of packaging, not substance. Years on, almost nothing has arrived to replace it — no one else is writing mecha fiction this smart, this specific, or this unembarrassed about desire. We recommend it to the right audience: buy it, read all three routes, and give it the hour it needs to make sense.