YMMV / Haven (2020)

• Awesome Music:
  • Danger, one of the composers from The Game Bakers' prior game Furi, returns for the soundtrack and does not disappoint.
  • "Move it Muffin" is the jammin' technofunk piece featured in the game's first reveal trailer and it's used during field exploration around Source.
• Disappointing Last Level: The game is essentially over once you acquire the last piece to repair the Nest. The final area features no enemies or obstacles and you essentially just follow the path to the end, with no real time pressure or penalty for falling off the platforms.
• Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: While jetting around the islands is pleasant and the combat is servicable, the meat of the experience is just spending time with Kay and Yu and watching their interactions.
• Genius Bonus:
  • When Kay first discovers helicaps on Source, he uses a series of actual botanical and mycological terminology to describe their appearance.
  • The planets of the Apiary are all named after quarks (though "Top" and "Truth" are two different names for the same quark).
• Narm: The game's proprietary slang can fall into this.
  • The game uses the word "boron" as an insult. Although it's obviously meant as a play on "moron", it's also the name of a real-life chemical element, which can make any usage of it as an insult sound somewhat weird to scientifically-minded players.
  • "Blooting" is roughly equivalent to a real-world F-bomb. It's also phonetically identical to "bluten", the German word for "(to) bleed", making it quite amusing to German natives playing the game in English. That said, this could also act as a (probably unintentional) Genius Bonus if you retranslate the German term into English and realize that "bloody [whatever]!" serves a similar function as a curse as "blooting [whatever]!" does.
• Spiritual Adaptation: It feels like a Monolith Soft Xeno series of RPG games even though it wasn't made by them.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Political?: Two protagonists who are literally named "U" and "K" who love each other so much they decide to escape from their obligations in the Planetary Federation to live on their own little planet which consists of small islands. Although they have a major argument at one point they decide to stay together and sever all connections towards the Planetary Federation. And the game was developed sometime around Brexit. Needless to say, some picked up on the parallels.

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