Roleplaying / survival video gave Haven stands out from a very large crowd on one key feature - you don't play one character. You play as two. A couple.

A new update titled Couples doesn't explode the playing field and have you playing multiple couples. Rather players now have a choice of couples and those choices include same-sex pairings.

The game's story revolves around Yu and Kay who flee a civilization where marriages are arranged to make a life together on an uninhabited planet.

Unlike most games which include a romantic or sexual element, that element isn't a relatively minor and also optional feature.

It's central both to story and gameplay.

Haven launched in December 2020 with a heterosexual Yu and Kay and in this respect may have seemed a bit backwards.

Representation of and allowance for different sexualities in video games has become the norm but when that only makes up a tiny portion of the game, it's relatively simple and inexpensive to be inclusive.

Not so when you're a small indie studio, as are Haven developers The Game Bakers, and also making such an innovative game where it would be difficult to predict sales.

Originally they conceived the game to feature eight couples but had to pull back to just one for launch.

Adding these extra two was a big task.

Our new renditions of Kay and Yu are voiced by two fantastic actors: Lexie Ann Kendrick and Ryan Highley, gave life to the characters across all 80,000 lines of dialog in the game. We’ve also made sure the written dialog is right for each couple across the 8 languages Haven is available in, and lines with explicit or implicit gender references have been modified to appropriately reflect your selected characters (if Yu says “Mister” to Kay… that doesn’t work with a woman anymore).

To put that in context, Bethesda's fantasy RPG Skyrim has 60,000 and their post-apocalyptic RPG Fallout 110,000 lines.

And they're not a small indie studio. They're one of the major players.

Voice-acting is expensive.

The lines themselves though, largely unchanged.

When we first started to work on this update, soon after the release, I was curious, as a writer, about how the original dialogues would translate for these two new couples. Will some of them sound odd? Unnatural? After all, I wrote Kay as a man, and Yu as a woman, didn’t I?

I was pleasantly surprised to realize that, pronouns and minor details aside, almost nothing had to be edited. Overall, the alchemy between the characters remained unaffected.

As if characters weren’t determined by their gender. As if men and women could have the same interests, the same thoughts, the same feelings.

Funny.

Haven's free Couples update is available now on PC (Steam, GOG and Epic), Xbox, Playstation and Switch.

[ Main Image: Haven - Couples Update trailer. Credit: The Game Bakers via YouTube. ]

Corbinais, Pierre (March 4, 2022). Haven Update: Meet the new Yu and Kay. Xbox Wire.

Lourdel, Mylene (March 3, 2022). Choose Your Yu and Kay and Play as a Same-Gender Couple With Haven Update Available Now! The Game Bakers.

The Game Bakers (March 4, 2022). Haven - Couples Update - Available now for free! YouTube.

Thoa, Emeric (March 3, 2022). Freedom to love: Choose the Yu and Kay you want to play as. Playstation.blog.

Wikipedia. Fallout 4. (viewed March 7, 2022)

Wikipedia. Haven (video game). (viewed March 7, 2022)

Wikipedia. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. (viewed March 7, 2022)