Co-operative Romance
*Bow-chicka-wow-owwwww* No! Bad background music, stop it!
*Kenny G sax floats in from the nether* Wait- What? No! Stop, I say! Take your sax and go on the waggley-eyebrows you rode in on!
…
Right. We done? Good.
So I recently heard for the first time about a game called Haven from one of Angie’s posts. It’s from the developers behind Furi, The Game Bakers. Furi was an extremely well received game but even so, Haven forges its own path in quite a different direction in all respects except elements of the aesthetic and an overarching theme of fighting for freedom.
Where Furi was a frenetic action combat game — Haven takes a more relaxed JRPG approach to combat and includes pacifist options to at least some extent.
You play as two characters — a young couple in love. So far we don’t know a lot about their situation, but they’ve escaped to a deserted planet in order to stay together. We don’t know why law or the rest of society wants them apart, but I figure it’s something we’ll discover in the course of the game.
The game is focused on being a single-player experience first and foremost but allows for co-op play as well.
As a single-player experience, this could potentially be a bit of fun. As a co-op experience it makes me extremely uncomfortable.
I noted that in the comments back to Angie, but it took a bit of back and forth to get to a point of articulation on why it makes me so uncomfortable.
Turns out it wasn’t even really that deep or complicated in the end. It’s simply that I view the character (or characters) I control in a game, at least to a certain extent, as an extension of myself. Their actions are my actions. Extend that out to a co-op situation and my character is ‘me’ and your character is ‘you’.
But it doesn’t even matter who I imagine inserting into the role of ‘you’, it seems to me this would be an incredibly awkward and uncomfortable experience — including even playing with my wife (were she even interested in gaming).
I think The Game Bakers have come to this realisation or otherwise already received this feedback though. If you look at their original press kit it merely says, ‘A solo game at its core, but at any time, a second player can jump in locally.’ Contrast to more recent commentary on the co-op feature on the Steam page, ‘A RPG to play solo or with a special someone.’
For me? That still seems strange. But a bit more understandable. I wonder whether or not it would be a different perception if my wife and I gamed together more generally. I think not, but I can’t be certain.
