Aielman15

Angry otter yells at clouds

Definitive Edition (For Real This Time)™

Not liking something doesn't mean it should be removed.

And I never said that.

Any negative review of a game then becomes fair game.

No, it doesn't. If you truly, truly believe that the review is authentic, I have a bridge to sell you.

Yes. Never in a million years I would consider "cringe game, made by a liar" an honest review, and I don't know why anyone would consider it as such. It's clearly part of a harassment campaign.

should be forcefully removed just because the dev doesn’t like it?

It should be removed because it's not a review and has nothing to do with the game at hand, not because the dev doesn't like it.

“I’m not new to online harassment,” says designer Nathalie Lawhead, who spent two years trying to get reviews removed from their games’ pages. Both reference allegations of sexual assault that Lawhead made in 2019. “I assumed reporting Steam abuse might have its own issues. But when people suggested that I open a ticket, I did have hope that this would be the way to get it resolved.”

One of the reviews, published in 2023, read, “cringe game, made by a liar”. The other, a review of Lawhead’s game Blue Suburbia posted in 2024, said: “A women [sic] who seeks to destroy other’s [sic] career made this. It’s very poorly put together. She also probably has dual Israeli citizenship with how pointy her nose is.”

Despite Steam’s code of online conduct and community guidelines prohibiting “abusive language or insults”, public accusations or “discrimination”, moderators initially cleared both reviews after Lawhead reported them.

What's with Lemmy users and lying and bending backwards to shield poor indie dev company Valve from harassment? Does Gabe's dick taste that good?

Hooty Is the "watcher" in "watchers and dreamers".

He watches everything. He's probably watching you right now.

Ngl, it's not my kind of game but this sounds very cute and exactly how a healthy relationship should work.

I'll preface this by saying that this is my personal opinion and it's in no way representative of how Ace gamers (or even gamers in general) should evaluate their games.

TL;DR: the game actually develops the characters and their relationship, which in turn makes me care about them, which in turn makes me tolerate their sex scenes. Meanwhile, many other games that treat sex as a prize take the easy route: they give you a checklist, and if you complete it, you are "rewarded" with a poorly animated sex scene with a character who doesn't care about you in the slightest and is only there to arouse the player.

LONG COMMENT: For me specifically, it's a matter of context, mood and consent. While I'm still not exactly comfortable with sex scenes, even in a game like Haven, I didn't hate them because they felt natural and coherent. They were not a "reward" for me, but a choice made by the characters.

I'll use Mass Effect 2 as an example of a game whose romance options I didn't like. I never felt like the crewmembers were actual people, because they never did anything on their own. They stayed in their room doing... nothing, like they were part of the ship's furniture. There was a stoic soldier, and an assassin with a conscience, and a hardcore vigilante, and even a badass warrior-nun! It didn't ultimately matter, they never did anything. But as soon as I stepped into their room, they'd start unloading their sad backstory on me, like I was their therapist or something. They never showed any interest in me whatsoever; they barely knew anything about my character beyond my name, but I was expected to care about them, for some reason?

After a few such interactions, they'd ask me to do a job for them (tied to their sad backstory), and after that, they'd suddenly go "hey, we got a lot of chemistry, want to bang?" like it was some kind of reward. Congratulations, Player! You visited this character enough times, picked the correct dialogue options to keep them talking about themselves, and even completed a risky mission on their behalf: you totally deserve the steamy hot sex scene!
And if you do, they do... nothing, ever again. They become part of the furniture of the ship - but this time it's permanent, because there are no more interactions with them.

The game doesn't care to take your relationship in any meaningful direction, or better yet, it isn't building any kind of relationship between them and your character in the first place. It was all in service of the hot steamy sex scene.
Sex is the prize, and it painfully shows in the way the dialogue is written. It feels... icky. Dishonest. I was turning everyone down at every opportunity, as if I was Matrix-dodging their heart-shaped bullets, because the game made it very clear that everyone was down bad for my character. But it also felt like the game was constantly second-guessing me, asking me if I truthfully cared about those characters, or if I was doing what I was doing because I wanted to reach the "prize".
It reached a point where I stopped interacting with a character altogether because she made me deeply uncomfortable (it was the second-in-command/crew therapist: in our very first interaction, she told me she wanted to bang me; in our second interaction, she informed me that the insectoid guy I had just recruited was hot stuff and needed to get laid).
The game also has a Codex, and the very first entry is "This is an all-female alien race. [Infodump on their sexual life]" which would almost be hilarious if it wasn't for the sexist connotation. Like, I could go on for days about the many ways ME2 made me feel uncomfortable during my playthrough, but I'll stop here.

In Haven, sex is never treated as a prize: the player is not tasked with doing stuff to unlock the sex scenes, and the sex scenes are not used to titillate the player. There are dozens of unique interactions between Yu and Kai - some of them playing games or being goofy, some of them doing mundane stuff like cooking or taking a shower, and some of them having sex - because sex can be a (meaningful) part of a romance, but it's not the only component of a relationship.
The way they talk and interact shows that they like and care about each other. I was willing to "accept" the sex scenes because it was what they wanted, not what I wanted; It was a natural development of their relationship and not a "prize" that I achieved by pressing buttons on a dialogue wheel. Many other games lack substance and depth, and have shallow relationships built on a fake score system which tasks the player with increasing the meter by doing arbitrary stuff, which then culminates in a sex scene that only exists to arouse horny teenagers and leads to no meaningful development in the relationship; Haven, on the other hand, builds the relationship first and foremost, and keeps developing it for the entirety of the game. Sex is one of many possible interactions between the characters, and it's never something that you need to achieve, but something that happens naturally and organically because the two characters really love each other; I think it's meaningful that the game doesn't end with a sex scene, because sex is not the end game, but a small part of a much more complex relationship.

I feel like all animals get automatically better when they grow from "can pet" to "can hug".

This was... Unexpected.

I own the entire first quadrilogy, although I only played the first one. I liked it, although gameplay was a bit repetitive, but I loved the early '00 interpretation of the internet and a big MMO offline game. It was unique for its time. Despite not playing it that much, Mac Anu's soundtrack is still very nostalgic to me.

Is this a reboot, a spin-off or a completely new game that only shares the same premise with the original?

I liked Haven's romance, because it's the only game that actually bothers to show the actual relationship.

Too many games show romance as a slow burn which eventually culminates in a kiss at the very end of the game (and then roll credits), or a checklist that eventually ends with the two characters mimicking sexual intercourse within the boundaries of video game physics, and then... Nothing, because the sex scene is the "reward" for going through the checklist, not the beginning of an actual relationship.

Haven begins when the two characters are already in love. They flee to some deserted planet and live their happy life. They joke, they play, they have sex, they argue and talk and annoy each other. It's one of the most convincing relationships I've seen in a video game.

I'm Ace, and the game made me realize that I don't hate sex. I just hate the way sex is usually portrayed in media.

I also think how much you generally have to pay for games has gone way up with respect to the cost of living.

I don't necessarily agree with you on this specific point (although I agree with the rest of your comment).

Gaming is unfathomably cheap nowadays and the conversion $/hrs is incredible. While yes, day 1 prices are higher than they used to be, discounts are frequent (excluding Nintendo platforms) and games tend to last a LOT longer than they used to. Excluding old-school JRPGs, I don't remember many games from the PS1 era lasting more than 10/15 hrs. Nowadays that's the baseline length for any single player game, and it goes only higher from there.

And that does not include the plethora of F2P and live service games that people can waste literally thousands of hours into, free giveaways (I have hundreds of titles on Epic Store that could probably satisfy all my gaming needs until the day I die), etc...

The cost of gaming has gone up only if you are a Nintendo aficionado who adamantly refuses to jump to any other platform and buys all new releases day 1, or a PC master race whose eyes strain from playing games at anything less than 300 fps on the latest NVIDIA card. For any other demographic, gaming prices are fine and more approachable than ever.