Heaven Will Be Mine is a visual novel created by Worst Girls Games (Aevee Bee and Mia Schwartz) and Pillowfight Games (Conrad Kreyling and Jo Fu), with music and sound by Alec Lambert. It can be played on Windows, Mac, and Linux PCs, and on mobile iOS systems. The game is meant for an older, adult audience, since the game contains many complex and mature themes around queerphobia, gender, and war. Its relationship plotlines—it is, after all, a romance game—include a lot of sexual elements, both implied and explicit, as the game draws a clear connection between mech-fights and (sadomasochist) sexual relations. 
Heaven Will Be Mine is a game that would be better understood and enjoyed by an adult audience, especially a queer adult audience, as its themes and subject matter touch on experiences more likely to be relatable to queer adults. Additionally, adults will be better prepared to handle the mature subject matter. That isn’t to say that minors can’t/shouldn’t play this game, or that they wouldn’t gain something from it. However, especially compared to Worst Girls Games’ previous game, We Know The Devil, which was about teenagers in summer camp and dealt with queer coming-of-ages, it’s clear that Heaven Will Be Mine is older in almost all senses, including the characters themselves. Aevee Bee calls it a “thematic sequel” to We Know The Devil.
Playing Heaven Will Be Mine as a feminist means exercising character agency to the fullest in the playful pursuit of queer feminist futures.
The personal and political intertwine in Heaven Will Be Mine—your choices about your personal relationships also inform your political existence. The game makes sure to give you plenty of choice in that regard. Heaven Will Be Mine, as a visual novel, consists of mostly dialogue and prose scenes, but rather than a single straightforward narrative, the game gives the player some control over how the story unfolds. 
The “main story” is constructed through the game’s Missions mechanic, with each mission the player character is assigned leading to a unique scene with another pilot. These missions are supplemented by comms dialogue and mail and alerts that the player has the leisure to check and read at their own pace. Missions are assigned two at a time, and while the player cannot skip missions entirely, they are free to delay these missions and decide the order in which they complete them. By giving the player the choice on how these missions unfold, the player is given the opportunity to experience the story on their own time, in their own order, which gives them a greater sense of autonomy over the game’s narrative. This greater control over the way the story is told reflects tenets of queer time, which rejects a single predetermined order in which things must occur.
Each mission also gives the player further agency to decide on the character’s relationships and future, as it presents the player with a choice regarding how you want to proceed with the pilot you’re interacting with. This can be a decision to fight or talk with the pilot, to stay or leave. Some decisions fulfill mission parameters better than others, but rarely do the decisions ever give the player a straightforward option, with courses of action and consequences you’d expect. Within the complicated metaphors of self and others that Heaven Will Be Mind, for example, fighting another pilot in their ships could bring you closer than sitting down to talk ever could. While the added complexity of the game’s choice mechanic can lessen the sense of control a player has, it also complicates the idea of mastery over the game. There is no right answer, which in turn alleviates the drive that a player might be instilled with to “win” the game, therefore allowing the player to instead turn to alternative methods of experiencing the game’s story.
Even as you play one of the three playable roles, you’re not tied down to carrying out missions solely in the service of your assigned faction. You can, in fact, actively work against them the entire time, and the game won’t deliver any tangible consequences upon you. All that changes is the weight of your affiliations between the three main factions, which determine the ending you get. The pilots you fight/flirt/forgive each represent a different ideological faction from yours, while also maintaining their own unique backstories, character traits, and desires distinct from the faction they affiliate with. Each of the three main characters all have complicated, even adversarial, relationships with their faction. Despite this, the decision to advance a certain faction’s agenda is uncontrollably linked to the decision to advance a relationship in a certain direction. 
Throughout my playthrough, I found myself weighing my desire to grow closer with a certain pilot to my desire to advance a different ideological goal. I wanted to fight Pluto, for example, but did I want to give Pluto’s faction, Cradle’s Graces, that final advantage? As I learned more about each faction’s ideology and the way they’ve molded, helped, and traumatized the pilots I encountered, which one could I bear to support?
In short, Heaven Will Be Mine leverages classic visual novel choice mechanics and a unique missions interface to give the player a lot of control over how they want to explore the queer narrative being crafted in the game. This agency, as described by Shira Chess in Play Like a Feminist, promotes feminist thinking by encouraging players to exercise and examine their control over the game and the interpersonal/political conflicts it simulates. At the same time, though, it is deeply unapologetic about its own themes, and uninterested in letting players get through the game without having to think about it.
I mean, Heaven Will Be Mine is certainly a game. It is a game about women piloting giant mechs (“Ship-Selves”) in space, using those giant mechs to fight to advance or betray the political and ideological goals of their faction, and have messy relationship drama with each other. It’s a game about the future of humanity, and the future of queer people, and Gundam tropes. 
It’s set in an alternate reality where the Cold War was instead about all of humanity combating an unidentified alien threat, which has been soundly, which is directly related to the kind of ending you’re expecting.Now that the Cold War has passed, there are three different factions who are split on what humanity should do next.The Memorial Foundation wants to make everyone go back to Earth. Cradle’s Graces wants this portion of humanity to stay in space, where they’ll never go back, and the Celestial Mechanics want to define themselves as a new kind of alien, if the rest of the people on Earth don’t see them as human anymore.
Space, untethered from the actual Earth and the societal forces it exerts, is the allegorical domain of queer people. It’s space that allows the main characters to inhabit mecha bodies and engage, freely and without fear, in queer relationships and self-actualization. A big theme in Heaven Will Be Mine is the concept of gravity, which is what the game asserts as the ultimate requirement for humans to survive in a place. The game’s climax features a fight for control of the Lunar Gravity Well, which controls the gravity that powers the ongoing survival of all the space-dwelling humans. Gravity, in this game, is heavily associated with the concept of Culture—a force that grounds people, binds them together, and can crush. No wonder everyone is grasping for the ability to define gravity, and therefore Culture, for themselves.No wonder why space, as vast and boring and dying as the game describes it, holds such allure to those made outcast by Earth’s society.
Queer and feminist theory are pretty tightly wound together in Heaven Will Be Mine, but it succeeds at intertwining feminist theory by allowing the player to exercise agency as a female character, as mentioned above, and through its focus on the experiences of queer women. Not only are the main characters deconstructions of various mecha/Gundam female character tropes (Pluto is the stereotypical hero’s “psychic girlfriend”, Saturn is a bratty Gundam pilot in the role of a Rei Ayanami type, and I’m not well versed enough in Gundam to pin down Luna-Terra), but their personalities, goals, and struggles reflect their experiences growing up as queer women. 
Pluto, for example, grapples with pressures from her gendered position as the “Princess” of Cradle’s Graces, and the nurturing role she inhabits for her faction—things that pertain to the way the world treats her as a woman. While the setting and concept is fantastical, these emotional situations reflect real experiences that women and queer people can identify and resonate with when playing.
The route of Heaven Will Be Mine that I played for this critical play was Luna-Terra’s route, with the Cradle’s Graces ending. The culmination of this ending involves a true dissection of the role of outer space in Heaven Will Be Mine. Despite the Cold War, the aesthetic gestures at military structure that the queer people in space fighting over the future make, no one ever dies in these fantastically transcendental mecha space fights. 
People can be hurt, but no one dies, and if you don’t die then there’s always a possible future to construct. Between ship-selves, fighting is an act of communication. True to the game’s romance aspect, it’s relationship building or breaking—an expression of trust. Compared to the inhuman-looking real-military weapons of Earth, which are capable and trained to kill for real, the ship-selves are toys. This is not a derogatory comparison, however, as the game embraces the endless possibilities for queer feminist futures that playful interaction and disagreement can facilitate.
In the Cradle’s Graces ending, the characters declare war on the Earth and escape to Venus, where they are able to engage in playful combat with Earth’s soldiers. Immediate mass societal change may not have been achieved as the characters initially hoped, but a brighter future can be built by engaging the dominant Earth culture in play. This attitude is further emphasized by the art direction, which changes from the crisp and futuristic digital art style of the rest of the game to crayon drawings on crumpled paper, invoking a more childlike and fun mood. 
Not only does Heaven Will Be Mine promotes feminist play by engaging players in exercises of agency over romance, mech-fighting, and intragalactic policy, but uses parts of feminist game theory to advance its own exploration of feminist and queer liberation. At the same time, it helps train these methods of feminist thinking into its players, or at least opens up new perspectives based in theory for them. In the same way it’s sometimes a mecha story about mecha stories, it’s also a game about games.
One critique of Heaven Will Be Mine is that it could definitely be a more accessible game. Heaven Will Be Mine is a reading heavy game, and given the style and content of its passages, no easy task to read everything. While I certainly struggled to get through some of the wordier parts of the story, I feel like it would be disingenuous to suggest that it remedy itself of this accessibility barrier by becoming less wordy or simpler in concept, which I think would do a disservice to both the game and fans. Some tools, I think, could have made it more accessible. Especially with people who might struggle to read so much at a reasonable pace, an audio component to the dialogue and narration is one way in which the game could improve its accessibility. Not only would it assist people in reading and understanding the text, it would also make the game available for players who are not able to read text on a screen.
At the same time, I think it’s also worth recognizing the logistical difficulty of getting all of the writing in Heaven Will Be Mine voiced, since Worst Girl Games is an indie studio of two people who don’t have the funds of corporate backed games, or even other indie games of greater popularity. I feel like this scenario raises interesting questions on meeting accessibility needs on limited resources. I don’t really know any practical solution to this aside from making sure text-to-speech software works on the game, though.
