It is set in the early 22nd century, when the humanity has largely managed to overcome the carnage of the preceding century. It was helped along by the discovery of an element called Soviten on a distant planetoid named Naic. Sebastian Mar is one of the colonists selected by the Nomoni Conglomerate for the mining expeditions on Naic. However, he ends up waking up on the Naic outpost all alone, with the colony clearly ravaged and everyone else missing, and likely dead.
There doesn't appear to be anything else to do but escape: however, that requires not only looking up the codes to all of the malfunctioning systems at the outpost, but then also making it to the launch site, across the plains that cannot sustain human life outside of the spacesuits, but are much less uninhabited than the colonists thought...
Tropes present in HEVN:
- Artificial Limbs Are Stronger: There's an instruction booklet for Nomoni's employees on how to operate and maintain their implants, which includes both the neural ones and the exoskeleton attachments like the enhanced BioMag arms.
- Crapsack World: Zig-zagged. The intro text mentions that the world had come to the brink of total collapse by the end of the 21st century, but pulled back, and in 2128, the things had started to improve again. Then, though, millions were crippled or outright killed by a mysterious epidemic.
- First-Person Ghost: Played absolutely straight.
- Green Rocks: Soviten, the element mainly found on Naic, and said to be key to the fantastical progress of the world and equally fantastical profits of the Nomoni Conglomerate. Amongst other things, it also significantly boosts organisms' growth.
- MegaCorp: The Nomoni Conglomerate, able to manage far-flung celestial colonies on their own thanks to the profits from Soviten mining.
- Mission Control: Seb soon makes contact with the only other known survivor, Edna, who continues to guide him over the comm link throughout the game.
- Playing with Syringes: Nomoni's researchers thought it was "incredible" when they had taken the offspring of Naic's already aggressive hood beetles, placed them near soviten, and watched as they swiftly grew in size and mass, with all-too-predictable results.
- Sanity Slippage: There's a sanity level, which can go down under sustained stress.
- Sprint Meter: There's stamina, which is consumed when running or fighting in melee.
- Story Breadcrumbs: Most of the story is contained within the various journals and logs.
- Wizard Needs Food Badly: Seb needs to eat and drink in order to keep up his Nutrition levels.
- Zeerust: All of the computer terminals on Naic are much like the ones in Alien, and would have been ridiculously outdated 20 years ago.
