Heaven Alive

Playing and reviewing Heaven Alive immediately after Machina Caerulae makes for a study in contrasts. They’re similar enough that those contrasts are interesting – they’re both New-Twiny games with a 500-word limit, they both have cool visuals and custom interfaces to reinforce the vibe, and they’re both two-handers centering on an abusive relationship where you play the weaker figure, so we’re not comparing Nord and Bert and SPY INTRIGUE here or anything. But where Machina employed a stripped-down prose style and only branched at the very, very end, Heaven Alive takes a more conventional approach – each conversation option spins out into a unique bit of dialogue, which, while terse, are rendered in full sentences. It just about works, but the effort of cramming a more traditional choice-based IF structure into the brutal wordcount cap is too-often visible.

This isn’t to say the game doesn’t know how to communicate with economy: the game is a conversation between your character, a sort of cybernetic major-domo, and your master, an amoral interstellar caudillo, and so the interface presents all the text in two windows, one for him and one for you. The fact that his is bigger, and labelled “EXECUTOR”, and yours is smaller and labelled “WRETCHED”, is all you need to know (there’s also a cool barcode visual that goes with the names; the collage backdrop is cool too). Similarly, while the details of the inciting incident are a bit vague – there’s a ship in need of rescue, but it seems like it’s going to take more effort than Mr. EXECUTOR wants to expend – the power dynamics are clearly at the forefront, with the sci-fi technobabble more or less irrelevant. Again, the interface does a good job of making this visible, with a tracker labeled “approval” always visible in the upper-left corner (with that said, the interface might be slightly over-baroque – it took me a while to realize that the arrows under “approval” were in fact the passage forward/passage back buttons).

But where Heaven Alive starts to sprawl, it runs into difficulties. There are two different nodes, with three choices apiece, before you reach the binary endgame choice, which is an impressive breadth of options, but the consequence is that things can seem to escalate extremely quickly. Like, my first playthrough involved me calling the boss by his first name in an attempt to establish rapport, which he clearly didn’t like, so I apologized. He seemed to be mollified (and the approval meter, after swerving to -1, went back into more-or-less safely neutral territory), but then I had to choose whether or not to “subjugate myself.” Unsure of what that meant, I decided to stay the course, at which point I ripped a cyber-doohickey out of my own neck – I think it was somehow controlling me? – snarling that he was nothing without me. With a little more room to breathe, this ramp-up might have been dramatic and compelling, but as it was it felt too abrupt to land.

After some repeat plays, I found that there were some variations that didn’t come off quite as intense (in particular, if your approval is positive, defiance just leads to punishment rather than a definitive rupture). But regardless, I found the details of the relationship were too fuzzy, and race to the finish line too quick, to establish effective stakes for the final submission/defiance choice; to me the WRETCHED and the EXECUTOR came off as plot contrivances rather than people. Now, this might partially be due to the fact that I never explored the first set of options – real talk, I live in LA and Trump’s currently got the military deployed in our streets, I am not in a headspace where I can click “subjugate myself” to a tin-pot dictator – so perhaps those branches lead to more satisfying outcomes, with pathos arising from the main character’s attempts to rationalize making accommodation with brutality. Still, if, in a project of 500 words, half the endings don’t fully click, that’s probably an indication you’ve got too many of them.

Adapted from a Review-A-Thon 25 Review

Style: Choice-Select
Played : 7/15/25
Playtime: 5m, three playthroughs

Another in my review sub-series "Penny Pinching Parity," where I attempt to match review wordcount to IF Jam limits! In this case, the count in question is 498.

This is a two-hander, a dialogue based lightly sci-fi game of living with mismatched power. It is a relatively short game of trying to influence a mercurial lord to engage a rescue mission, when said lord is more preoccupied with their own inter-personal potence. It doesn’t take many viewings of Game of Thrones to understand the dread of this scenario, of LIVING it. Ultimately, you choose between (Spoiler - click to show)self-respect and (Spoiler - click to show)physical abuse.

I think this dynamic is pretty well understood (if quite timely), and deeply unpleasant. This familiarity could undermine impact pretty quickly. So much so that having it be the entirety of the work’s artistic aims presents a challenge to the author. The solution? Make the game short. A distilled, heightened representation, that has its say and lets you stew in the aftermath before you fully realize it is done. This is the perfect way to realize this message.

If I had a quibble with the game, it was in its multimedia choices. Not all of them. For example, the “Approval” score being the only game stat was a kind of genius way of underlining how primarily important this lord’s opinion was in the scheme of things. There is no “happiness” score, no other score AT ALL. Similarly, the sound choice was nicely evocative of the mood of the piece - omnipresent dread, even behind seemingly transactional conversations. Highlighting that the content of the words is only half the story.

Its visual presentation is what I find less focused. To my eyes, there is just a bit too much going on, in a way that doesn’t coalesce together. The background conveys “generic sci fi background” where its sci-fi-ness is the least necessary thing about the work. The bar coding is a very powerful choice, emphasizing the property aspect of the characters… except the lord ALSO has a barcode? That feels like a mixed message for this particular work. The title screen also feels unfocused: its logo and title fonts feel like too many disparate graphical elements that don’t resonate with each other. “Heaven” is one sci-fi font, “Alive” a more organic one, and the barcoding a third, only the latter resonating with the background in any meaningful way. Graphical dissonance is not a BAD impulse, but to my eye, this feels like one too many. I might suggest recasting “Heaven” to more align with the barcoding, to maximize the visceral punch of the “Alive” choice.

Don’t let these quibbles get you down though. As we have established, brevity and focus, even imperfectly realized, are overriding virtues. Don’t make me COMMAND you to play it… that might undermine your APPROVAL stat… and nobody wants that…

Feeling word-parity smug. Exactly 498!

One of the several games on the list from a jam I happened to take part in – this time, it’s Neo-Twiny 2024. I didn’t play this one back when it released, probably because there’s been 141 entries total, 138 if you don’t count my own. That’s a whole lot of games so some of them just didn’t come into my field of vision, which is why I was happy to see Heaven Alive as the next entry. I might never be able to read every single Neo-Twiny 2024 entry but I’m glad I get a chance to experience one of them now.

Heaven Alive abides by the “500 words maximum” rule with the total wordcount of 498 so it was a fairly quick read. There are two sides in this story – The Executor (who is, according to the description, “a space-faring warlord”) and The Wretched (“his visier”). While “visier” sort of implies an advisory position, it becomes very clear that The Executor probably wants advice only if it aligns with what he wants.

Briefly about the visuals. For me, they’re definitely the highlight of the entire experience. Absolutely gorgeous styling that definitely evokes the sci-fi vibe the game is meant to have. The bar code motif, coupled with the fact that The Wretched, which we play as, is implanted with some sort of a device, kind of makes my skin crawl. Is The Wretched disposable? Are we just one of many, lined up to serve?

Due to the wordcount limit, the conversations are quite short and in some cases, that makes things feel a bit sudden. Then again, we are dealing with a space warlord who will torture you for disrespect, so perhaps the suddenness is appropriate. Anger and violence can be lightning quick, after all. There is no good ending here, really: if you end up defying him, he’ll torture you. If you end up bowing down to him, you’ll still lead a life of pain from the device (a transmitter of some sort, clearly an instrument of punishment) implanted within you. How long can you keep The Executor satisfied? How much longer will the torture last?

In all honesty, I’m not entirely sure what to think about it. I can’t say with clear conscience that I “had fun” or “enjoyed it” but also I can’t say that it was a bad game. The visuals are beautiful, the prose is neat, it’s all executed really well. Guess it’s just another one of those things that simply didn’t hit for me specifically and this is completely fine because the world doesn’t revolve around me. Try it out for yourself and see if it’s for you.