The Domain of the Starry Witch

Heaven Will Be Mine & We Know The Devil

"Thankful for our Cradle's Graces, but we're not coming back." That is the tagline of the faction Cradle's Graces in the indie game/visual novel Heaven Will Be Mine, developed by Pillow Fight & Worst Girls Games. It's also going into the collection of quotes I keep in the back of my mind to give myself strength when I need it. And it makes a cool enough way to start this post.

So, I'm late to the party. These are games that released before I started college, and I'm only just now getting to them. But in case you're like me, let's get into it for real.

Recently, I played through Heaven Will Be Mine (HWBM) and We Know The Devil (WKTD) at the recommendation of a friend of mine. I had bought them back around Christmas and finally got around to playing them, which for me is pretty good. Since they were bought on a friend's recommendation, I had no idea what I was getting into when I opened up Heaven Will Be Mine. When I started the game and saw my option to play as Saturn, with a "Combat Style: Button Mashing/Bedroom Style: Button Mashing", I still wasn't prepared for the experience to come. It had an effect on me, so we're going to talk about it.

First, I'm going to go over what HWBM is without spoilers, then a bit about WKTD without spoilers, and after that we're going to get into spoiler territory, first for HWBM, then for WKTD, then for both. If you want to avoid spoilers because you want to play the games for yourself, I'll clearly mark that section. And honestly, you should go play the games yourself. HWBM is only USD 14.99 on Steam, and WTKD is only USD 6.66 (heh), and IMO, they're worth the price. They also won't over stay their welcome, my first playthrough of HWBM took 120 minutes, like a nice movie. My first playthrough of WKTD took 48 minutes, IIRC (WKTD is a much shorter game). In total, to 100% both games, it took me 86 minutes for WKTD and 5.4 hours for HWBM. And, oh, what do you get from those few hours. So, go buy them, or if you're not convinced, allow me to ramble more.

Also, at the end is a TLDR and a guide for playing them through without spoilers.

Heaven Will Be Mine: What's Next For Humanity? What Is Humanity?

The base premise of Heaven Will Be Mine is this: there was an Existential Threat. We fought it, we won. There's no more Existential Threat, good job everyone. But what next? We sent a bunch of people to space to fight it and now there's no need for them to be there. We won.

Well, as you might imagine, everyone has different opinions on this, and thus we get 3 factions, and a forth side of sorts. They are:

Celestial Mechanics: Opening Futures, Closing Pasts. Celestial Mechanics is the smallest faction, as far as I can tell, lore-wise. Their pilot is Saturn, the most determined pilot, in her Ship-Self (basically a mech), The String of Pearls, which looks like a humanoid cat. I'm sure that says nothing about her personality. CM is the transhumanist faction. Earth has already declared us less than human, so let's see what other, new, more exciting thing we can be instead! I would say that Saturn is the most determined pilot of the girls.

Cradle's Graces: Thankful for our Cradle's Graces, but we're not coming back. Cradle's Graces rejects the notion that humanity can only exist on Earth. They, led by their Princess Pilot Pluto in the Krun Macula, want to make a new future for humanity in space. We're already here, after all. We'll still be human, but we can be human in so many slightly different, slightly new, and more interesting ways. We can be more human in space than on Earth. So stop making us try to come back. Pluto and her ship are easily the most powerful pilot and ship in the game, so it's good that Pluto is only second-most determined.

Memorial Foundation: Never Forgotten, Every Story Told. Earth wants everyone to come back, or they'll declare us all the new Existential Threat and send the military and kill everyone. So, let's get everyone to come back before that happens. We'll go back to how things were on Earth before. We don't need space. We did our job, now it's time to come home. Luna-Terra, the oldest, most skilled, but least committed pilot pilots the Mare Crisium, an old school Ship-Self, the kind that still works with buttons and levers, for this faction.

I mentioned a 4th side, and arguably we could talk about at least a 5th and 6th, but the really important one is, as mentioned, Earth. Earth is the cause of all this conflict. Humanity's Cradle wants everyone to come home, or they're all aliens and they'll go and kill them. Earth isn't on the side of anyone in space, which is to say, they're the closest a story like this gets to a villain. Although, I think that calling them that would go against the spirit of things, just a bit. They're just very deeply rooted in Earth's Gravity and Culture.

Anyway, that's the base premise. These three factions, and these three girls (well, they're technically women, but I think they wouldn't like to be called that), fight for the future of humanity over 9 days. Whoever you play as gets to choose which faction to be loyal to, ultimately deciding who wins in the final struggle, and the future we get. My favorite faction and ending is Cradle's Graces, but I can name people I know and love who would each choose a different ending, and the strength of the writing is such that as long as it was them making the decision, I would be happy with it. Also, the strength of the characters are that each ending is a good ending -- there's no need for a "True" ending.

As for the pilots, Saturn is a new pilot, an inexperienced (but still very talented), determined, brat. I mean it, she's a BRAT. She's so much fun to play. You should definitely play her first. She's the only pilot who I think is entirely dedicated to her cause, and she's just such... such a brat. I wish people would let me get away with what she does. I suppose I could always give it a try.

Luna-Terra is the older experienced ace pilot. She's here to "be the adult villain". She's been through so much and she just wants to stop it and be done and have everyone stop suffering. I can hardly blame her. She's also terribly uncertain about what the best path forward is. She doesn't want to be here, making these decisions, but she is. I can understand her.

Pluto is the best pilot. She's the most powerful. She's special, but she'd rather not be. She's the vacuum of everyone's hopes and dreams in space, the leader of Cradle's Graces, more or less, and she'd rather not be. She's a leader, but she doesn't want to be. She too wants to be done, but she's more sure of herself than Luna-Terra. She's doing this for everyone else, even if it kills her. Yeah, I get that too, Pluto.

That's about all I can say without risking spoilers, so let's switch gears for a second...

We Know the Devil: Summer Scouts, Discount Magical Girls, Fighting the Devil

In We Know the Devil, you play a group of three kids at Summer Scouts. It's a Summer Camp with the seeming purpose of fighting the Devil. Apparently, the normal non-Summer Scouts get cool equipment and transformation sequences, but we've got to deal with shitty radios and no transformation sequences.

Jupiter, Neptune, and Venus are sent to a cabin for a night, and have to get through it. Easy enough, right?

Well... maybe.

The game is all about their interpersonal dynamics and I can't say much more it takes 50 minutes to go figure out what it's about yourself, an hour if you need to buy it and make a snack, go figure it out and come back.

HWBM: Gravity, Culture, Existential Threats, Aliens, and Humanity

Heaven Will Be Mine is certainly the more densely packed game with lore and philosophy, between the actual story, the comms, and all the data packets to read. And oh boy, is it interesting.

If you've chosen not to play the game for some reason, or it's been a while, or you didn't play through everyone's story and didn't see all the lore, my brief summary is this:

Gravity, which warps spacetime, and Culture, which influences how humans act, are very similar, albeit Culture is weaker. Humans can't exist without either, and can alter both, although Gravity is much harder to on a meaningful sense. Changes in one affect the other.

The Existential Threat is the name for the Devil we fought in Summer Scouts and the shadows that jump in the night and for every evil that humans have ever worried about, every "other", every "alien". Once we realized what it was, we pushed it off Earth and into space, and we made a school for kids to pilot Ship-Selves to fight it. Kids are better at this sort of thing, of course, like they were on Earth, but even better in space, since they're not as bound by Earth's Gravity and Culture, and since the Existential Threat is everything that is everse of our Gravity and Culture, they're better equipped to fight it. Of course, they also have Tidal Reactors, but even their natural Tidal Sensitivity is way higher.

The war went well. Sure, it might not ever have been there, it might have been tricks of light and shadow and our weapons always pierced it and destroyed it with 100% accuracy and no one ever died, but it could've been really bad if it got to Earth, and we felt like we were doing something important, and it's always been weaker than us, but always there, so at least we're holding it at bay.

And then Pluto came along and was the best of all of them and destroyed the Existential Threat and... fuck, what now?

Some people speculate that Humanity, whatever it is, requires an Existential Threat to function. For most of human history, it has been... other humans. We finally figured out that it was just the manifestation of our fears though, we forced it into space, but we did too good, we won, and now... well, according to those people, we still need something Alien to be Human. We need an Existential Threat. Destroying it was a mistake.

According to others, though, we don't. We can move into a new era of Humanity, one without that threat. Or at the very least... we can try.

All of that philosophy stuff is very interesting to me, even though I don't particularly like philosophy, although at this point I think I'm just saying that. I'm of the opinion that Existential Threats can help humanity to function, arguably, to reach its best potential. I would also agree that humanity, in the lack of an external threat, tends to turn inward on itself, looking for threats. All it takes is a brief glance at history to prove that truth.

Is that a core, foundational principle of humanity, though? Can we never be free from this need for a threat? Will we always turn other humans into threats if there's nothing suitably alien for us? And what does something being truly alien even mean? If it's what we can't imagine, than by definition... well, we can't imagine it. We can only imagine things that are sort of human (and yes I know this is a point made in the game and I know who it's made by IIRC but it is still a valid point), so... if we met something alien, would we even know? Would it even register as a threat? Would it be a threat? Should it be? Or could it still be something beautiful, even if it's not human?

I don't know the answers to those questions, but those are the sort of questions that HWBM makes you think about. I know that I'd like to believe that humanity doesn't require an Existential Threat to be human. That although they can help us quell our natural instincts to infight, one day, we will be mature enough as a species to realize that other humans never are, and never will be, the enemy. However, I don't know that me believing that can make anything change. Ideals are great and all, but they're better when you have a massive mech to back them up, and I'm sadly lacking.

Now, let's talk about the fun bit: the endings and my thoughts!

So, I already mentioned before that I'm a Cradle's Graces girlie. Why? I mean, if you know me, it's pretty obvious. My whole thing IRL is wanting a better future for humanity in space, which is exactly what Cradle's Graces wants. And in their ending, they get it. Humans spread out across the entire solar system. A new future. Jungles on Aphrodite-which-is-now-Venus, moss on the rings of Chronos-now-Saturn, strange and clingy life on what-was-Ares-and-is-now-Mars. Sure, Earth is unhappy. Earth doesn't like our slightly altered version of humanity and they've done what humans have always done when there's a slightly different version of humanity: they've gone and declared us an Existential Threat. But they can't fight us in their way anymore, not the fight that kills anyone, or even hurts anyone. It's more of a loud cultural exchange. Some people come, some people go, and in the end, everyone gets what they want.

Would I prefer a Cradle's Graces ending without a war with Earth? I mean, sure. But at the end of the day, I'd take it just as is. Being able to walk on Mars without a space suit, walk through Venus, in a mech or otherwise, have a real future for humanity... it's a dream. And if Earth doesn't want to be a part of it, well, that's alright. They can keep sending up the ones who say they don't want to go but secretly do to come to our side, and we can send back anyone who wants to return to the Cradle. Everyone's happy that way.

My second favorite ending is the Celestial Mechanics ending. In this ending, Saturn gets what she wants. The Gravity Well turns in on itself, the reactors of the Ship-Selves evert, and everyone who was in space, who was human, is now alien. We are something other than human now, for the first time, finally. Earth wanted us to be less than human. To have a non-human threat. They finally do. Except. Iapetus wanted to make sure we could only fight. But we made sure we could do something else too. We're alien, sure. But we're not necessarily a threat.

Now, I'm not a transhumanist, so you might ask why I rate this above the Memorial Foundation ending, and I'll get to that in a bit when I address my thoughts on the MF ending. But, even though it's not what I want (I want to stay human, I like it, thank you), why do I like it?

Because the Celestial Mechanics ending is what a lot of people do want, and they should get it. Because although I don't want to be alien, I do think everyone is better off for there being something alien. Because I do think there is a future for all of us here, human and alien. And I think it's a good one. Not to mention, it's certainly in line with the themes of the series.

Now, the Memorial Foundation ending... in my opinion, Memorial Foundation isn't being honest with their tagline. At least CM owns it: We might be opening futures, but we can never go back to the past. We're closing off what came before. MF presents themselves as heroes: "Never Forgotten, Every Story Told." And to me, until I got to the MF ending, that sounded pretty noble. After all, I too want to tell every story.

However... if I were to put it more accurately, I would call it "Never Forgotten, Every Old Story Told."

In Memorial Foundation's ending, everyone comes back to Earth. Ares will never be Mars. Aphrodite will never be Venus. Those who aren't fully comfortable as humans will be forced to live as human for the rest of their lives. But, at least no one died. No one will ever die. The ET is gone and we prevented other humans from being it. And, thanks to Luna-Terra defying what Earth wanted... Luna is the Moon now. It's a part of Gravity and Culture. It's just as human as Earth. We made a change in the hundredths place to Earth's Gravity. We may all be on Earth, we may all be human, but we're not the same human as we were before. Earth changed for us as much as we changed for it. Those of us from space brought something back.

And of course, instead of living as some alien unknowable beings, or still having to fight a war with Earth, our three girls get to retire to a nice apartment on the Moon. The yuri stocks are certainly the most explicitly up with this ending.

And I have to admit, when I got it, and if I was Saturn or Pluto and Luna-Terra chose the MF ending for me, I wouldn't be mad. I would probably be happy. It's a good ending. They're all good endings. It is a personal dream of mine to have a cozy cottage with my wife/girlfriend(s), after all, and a Lunar version of that sounds awesome. Plus, no one dies, war is over, and there's no more Existential Threat.

But... while the MF ending is a nice ending, while it is a comfy ending, a cozy ending, I can't help but feel like it's selfish. Memorial Foundation closes futures as much as Celestial Mechanics closes pasts. There is no future for humanity anymore. Humanity cannot survive just on Terra and Luna. Sure, that might not be a problem for me, or my children, or my grandchildren, or their grandchildren. But it still feels ultimately selfish to close off the future of humanity because we weren't brave enough.

(That said it is very gay and I do love that scene it's so cute~!)

To wrap up this section, like I mentioned... I can think of someone I know, people I trust deeply and care about, who would each pick a different ending. And I would let them, because I would know they would believe in it, and I have the faith that they would make it good for all of us. Much like the girls in the game have that same faith. I think that says a lot about the strength of both the writing of the game, and of humanity and friendship in general. There's no ending here that I don't understand, that I don't see the appeal of. That I couldn't be convinced to take. There's no ending I would hold against someone else choosing for me if I was one of those girls. And like those girls, you can bet that I'd help her, whoever she is, if I saw that we were headed to an ending.

We Know the Devil: God is on 109.9 FM

There's much less to say about this game since the story basically plays out the same no matter how you go about it. I mean, I like that the girls get to kiss, and I like Venus' coming out. But there's not much to say so let's touch on the endings and wrap things up, shall we?

Jupiter is the Devil: I mean, a big storm from Jupiter. That makes sense. And honestly girl, I feel you.

Venus is the Devil: My favorite non-true ending. Get that angel look, girl! If only you could be a part of Celestial Mechanics...

Neptune is the Devil: Mmm yeah wet makes sense. I knew it was coming, still feel bad for her.

True Ending: So this can't be canon to HWBM, right? Unless it is, which is infinitely more interesting. Anyway, go off Celestial Mechanics.

In Conclusion: That Which Is Strong Will Not Triumph

TL;DR: Heaven Will Be Mine has a lot of philosophy, Anna would like a new future for humanity in space. She also really likes how the game does the whole Greek-to-Roman naming thing since she's never seen anyone call Aphrodite that before. Really, she likes everything about the game, especially how Pluto fucks with the narrative. Despite relating to both Pluto and LT more, she's trying to be more like Saturn right now. Faction like order: CG, CM, MF. But she doesn't dislike any of them.

WKTD is much less philosophical, still pretty fun. Very CM coded.

The yuri stocks are very high if you like girls kissing you should play HWBM. If you like cool art you should play HWBM. If you like philosophy you should play HWBM. If you'd like a little prequel you should play WKTD. Anna always experiences series backwards, it's becoming a talent of hers.

Recommended playing order (HWBM):

Recommended order (WKTD):

Anyway! I think that's enough of me rambling. If, perchance, you liked this, or you liked those games, do reach out to me to talk about them! I love rambling!

For now, may you travel well among the stars and stories, my friends.

Love, Anna, Starry Witch