Secret Little Haven

[got_quiet]

Name: Secret Little Haven
Status: Complete
Site: https://ristar.itch.io/secret-little-haven
Pairing: Gen
Description: Going to the one night showing of your favorite anime movie is harder than it looks. Featuring a trans girl's egg cracking.

I really like little retro OS simulators. They hit me in the nostalgia pretty hard for one, and they tend to play like puzzles, where you have to poke through all of the little applications and there are lots of ways to add fun little easter eggs or mini puzzles and games.  This game has all the usual doodads: a web browser, email, messaging, a tomagachi simulator, and an actual working text application where you can actually type, copy, and paste. Kinda cool.

 

Gameplay is driven mostly by the chat so there is sort of a VN element there where what you're doing is just picking your dialogue. I'm not sure that there is any branching paths though. Most of the dialogue has only one option, and in cases where you have multiple choices you typically are given stuff that just has slight differences in tone, though in some cases it does look like if I picked something else something might change. The problem is that the game took me about 2 hours and 45 minutes, and the save system was unreliable, so I wasn't willing to try playing more than once.

The game is set in 1999 so the internet is super new, and everyone is excited that you can go out and just look shit up on websites. The main website in the game has a message board, complete with "rate my signature" threads and shit like that. Like I said, very nostalgic. You play Alex, and spend a lot of time online chatting with your friends, mostly about your favorite magical girl show. There's a movie for it coming out in theaters and you're hyped, but your father is an overbearing and verbally abusive guy who wants to punish you into being a better son.

There are a lot of games out there about the trans experience, or focusing on the creator's individual feelings about their gender own identity. While I generally enjoy them I don't tend to relate to them, in part because they are almost always very specifically MtF, positioning femininity as aspirational and masculinity as unwanted or traumatic, and in part because they are often framed as about the creator's journey specifically. But this one hit me pretty hard a couple of times with themes that felt more broad and inclusive of the trans experience, even though it was still hyperfocused on the mtf world. The story has a lot of interesting moments that are very relatable to life as someone who is trans and lives online, like dealing with kinda knowing you're trans but not being out and having to navigate both the people in your real life who don't know what's going on,  and the people online who may know you as you but don't know about your trans status. It can make you feel a bit like an imposter or a liar, even when you're basically being more honest with them than with anyone else. It also approaches the disparities of access between even the middle class and the poor when it comes to resources for transition, which is something I haven't seen addressed in many games.

Big warning, if you're in the suppress and ignore stage this game may dig the knife in a bit. It's ultimately an optimistic take on things, recognizing that things can get very hard, you can lose people, you can not know what to do, you can be afraid, but in the end it wants to say that there is a way forward, and it's possible to figure things out. Even that sort of optimism can be a little traumatic, and one of Alex's friends represents the sort of person who is dealing by keeping the dysphoria buried so deep that just the suggestion that something may be up is agonizing. It benefits significantly from having a relatively large cast of people, all of whom feel real and have complicated relationships between each other. It really felt like this cast could have been any small group of people on the internet in the turn of the century.


 

There are some problems. Other people report issues with the UI not registering clicks. I was assured that when I logged out my progress would be saved, but when I opened the game to continue the next day it was starting back from the beginning, and this isn't a particularly a short game if you want to poke around all of the little side bits. For me this was a particular problem because I play my VNs in little chunks right before bed, so realizing that if I wanted to finish the game I had to commit to maybe an hour straight meant I'd have to change my habits just to get to the end. My understanding was that if I didn't leave exactly when the game prompted me to there was no auto save, and rather than mistake when that moment was, I played from beginning to end in one sitting, which I would rather not have done, as it resulted in my not poking through a lot of the little bonus elements of the game, like the tamagochi.

Even with that significant problem I would suggest thing game. It's one of the better ones that is focused on transness in the bundle, for sure, and it's fun to play with characters that I really started feeling for by the end. It's not often that I can say a game had a real emotional impact on me, but this one did.