[Games] Secret Little Haven (Review)

Release: 2018

Developer: Victoria Dominowski

Genre: Visual Novel

A part of the Itch.io Racial Justice bundle - 1/1,658

I think back to my times within niche communities and fandoms during the formative years of my adolescence. Obscure gaming and animation forums, Steam groups, online chat rooms, and the one or two penguins I would inexplicably start dating in Club Penguin - they’re fond memories and they’re times I definitely would never dare trade for a more bustling social life. Without these communities, for example, I think I would’ve been trapped in the conservative death cult of my birth church, it would've taken me far longer to understand my sexual identity, and worst of all I would have never met my husband. 

It was just one of the few things that immediately grabbed my attention with Victoria Dominowski’s Secret Little Haven - a visual novel that roots itself in the advent of the internet and the communities that were the information superhighway before the occupation of corporate social media. It’s romantically nostalgic. The rudimentary, dysfunctional, and highly questionable design choices of old-age computer technology and web design is just one of the many aspects of the “Y2K” aesthetic that is my bread and butter and Dominowski does an excellent job replicating the wonder of the era with her exaggerations. One design choice that I had forgotten about being something I experienced was the game often requiring me to spam click applications or links to get them working - and then on rare occasions they seemed to open without a hitch. Incredibly charming as it may be as a small testament to the authenticity of the product - it’s also something I don’t miss. 

SanctuaryOS and the magical girl forums also had their familiarity despite me being a bit too young to have fully experienced the days of needing to use a telephone line and an AOL demo CD from a local grocer to connect online even though I know my family had them. The boards specifically were more familiar filled with threads of mindless forum games, dead links, and a troll too entertaining to get rid of but also annoying enough to wish they’d stop posting. It really did make me nostalgic for websites that found themselves obsolete when Reddit negated the necessity for them to exist. The choice to premise within these dysfunctional yet incredibly important relics of the past is the key to the immense emotional core of Secret Little Haven. The game carries itself proud with a narrative framed through the unique interactivity offered by the gaming medium to tell a story of anxiety, familial abuse, and gender in ways unreplicable by any other medium. 

You may not like it, but this is what peak OS design looks like

The gameplay is simple: Select choice dialogue boxes, click a few links, play with a Tamagotchi, and write a fanfic. You play as Alex, a young teenager struggling with newfound feelings of insecurity with their gender upon discovering that the sole male character of their favorite show “Pretty Guardians Love Force” becomes a magical girl in the upcoming movie coincidentally showing for one night in their own city. Their cute, bubbly online presence and insistence on profile pictures of female characters from the shows they like felt immediately familiar to me along with their insistence on playing therapist for friends with a wide range of problems even when it crosses boundaries. The cast that lives within small, pixely IM messages have their own memorable personalities that remind me of plenty of the friends I’ve made at one point or another over the years. 

The college student way over their head, the obnoxious dude-bro you call a childhood friend, and the friend with their own gender insecurities, familiar issues, and financial anxieties - each felt eerily real in the way they bounced dialogue between disjointed rants and cutesy/cringe writing styles that could only be taken deathly seriously on the internet. Even having to juggle a conversation where you’re nerding out about television to one friend while having a full-blown panic attack in another was such an uncanny experience to witness being replicated through the on-rails dialogue exchanges. It added a discomforting degree of realism to the characters and did it through such a minor, most likely unexplored-by-anyone-else avenue. The less realistic but equally impactful element to this dialogue pertained to the conversations had with Alex’s father, John. 

These horrifying exchanges that ended each day and deteriorated the physical space that the game itself occupied stood out with how unique they were to the playing experience. Constantly flipping the few mechanics granted to the player on their head to simulate the fear and loss of control facing an abusive authority figure through dialogue windows was incredible. Your dialogue choices being forcibly changed, the graphical deterioration, and losing your sole autonomy as a player by losing your ability to choose - what an interesting way to frame upsetting situations. They reminded me of experiences I had with my own parents (albeit those experiences were far less extreme compared to what is depicted within the game). To have the colorful, gaudy safety of the SanctuaryOS replaced by grey, cold nothingness devoid of emotion and personality made the contrasts between the safety of online community and the realities of bad home situations obvious - but their visual representation undoubtedly hit close to home. 

So much for my game concept utilizing unstable dialogue boxes

What makes this game stand out to me is the love that exists within it. I don’t mean this as passive praise as many give to titles with lots of personality in the  “world-building” and characters - since most titles ideally have some level of care extended to them. What really makes Secret Little Haven special and an immediate inductee to my all-time favorites list is how intimate it is as an experience. I wouldn’t be surprised, mind the speculation, if this game is as much as a tool for catharsis and discovery for those within and outside of the LGBTQIA+ spectrum as it is a piece of meditation and reflection for the developer. The way these conversations frame themselves and the intricacies of the designs you’re allowed to interact with - I can’t view them as anything but theatrically dressed-up reflections on experiences that Dominowski went through in her own journey of self-discovery.  And honestly, SanctuaryOS itself should be in the running for the most on-the-nose name out there. 

Perhaps Laguna, a wise sage and vulgar “hacker” (read: discovered what terminal commands are), who sings praises to her trans identity and offers the most honest-to-god advice for Alex exists as someone Dominowski herself wishes she could’ve talked to during turbulent moments in her youth or is based off someone she met. These speculations mean very little without confirmation and it isn’t fair to frame them as fact to “strengthen” my praises for this game, but her role as the confirmation for gender-questioning individuals is not lost on me at the very least

Setting a game in the era of half-functional websites hosting anonymous communities experiencing their earliest exposures to corporate interests is interesting. These deeply connected communities undoubtedly led to many people discovering things about themselves in spaces that were safe and independent from the offline world. I myself experienced that through the final forms of such networks before they officially died out. For me, it’s the core of Secret Little Haven. It is an emulation of an era where safety, while not certain, could be cultivated through a mask of anonymity and allowing that to exist through a game as a careful and exaggerated recreation for newer generations to experience is incredible. Not only for its potential to allow players to discover something new about themselves or to understand female transness on a deeper level - but also as a way for Dominowski to exercise catharsis through the past. 

Never knowing where the ups and downs in life lead anyone but knowing that we will eventually figure it out is a realistic and comforting piece of assurance granted to us by the game through Alex. Secret Little Haven is simply incredible. Thoroughly entertaining, emotionally heavy, and unbounding with the comfort and love it provides despite its intense moments, this title is an absolute must for anyone interested in unique narrative experiences or who fall within the LGBTQIA+ spectrum. It is a short title, it comes and goes with as much time as it needs, but I have absolutely zero doubt that it will leave you with a powerful impact.

Technical issues: 

• For inexplicable reasons, the scroll bar in certain applications can glitch out and extend to the length of the entire application window preventing movement. It takes re-opening the application or screwing around with the scroll bar a bit to fix it. 
• Sequence breaking is possible if you jump one too many steps ahead of where the dialogue wants you to be. For example, while chatting with Samuel on day one I apparently marked my reminder app with the movie times too early. Once her dialogue finished, progress remained locked until I closed, re-opened, and entered an entirely new, and at this point-blank, reminder entry. 
• The font choice for this game makes the difference between a lower-case L and an upper-case I completely indistinguishable. This led to a lot of confusion and googling during the Terminal puzzle.
• If you click the chat app too many times it is possible to open two individual chat windows. You can not finish the day until you finish all conversations in both chats. 

Secret Little Haven can be purchased through Steam and Itch.io now.

This title is also available, along with over 1,000 others, in the Itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality for the minimum purchase of $5.00 USD. All proceeds go towards the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund and the Community Bail Fund and will be available until June 15th.