Released in 2020, Haven is a survival RPG about two lovers, Yu and Kay, looking to fix up their spaceship and escape an uninhabited planet. While the game’s core theme is about being allowed to love who you want, with Yu and Kay having fled their homeworld in order to be together, you were ultimately restricted to playing as a heterosexual couple. As of today, that’s no longer the case.
Developer The Game Bakers has announced a free Couples update, which gives you the choice to cast Yu and Kay as a man and a woman, two men, or two women. Whichever genders you pick, it doesn’t change the story; it’s simply there to allow players the option to experience it as a same-sex couple. Also, Yu and Kay still look roughly the same whether they’re men or women, which creative director Emeric Thoa has explained.
“Looking at the new Yu and Kay, you will notice that Kay and Yu look very similar across all playable versions,” says Thoa in a PlayStation Blog post. “There are two reasons for that: first, they are the same characters in the story, they have the same personality, backstory, and life. And second, for technical reasons, we had to keep the same body size, hairstyle, and body shape.”
These new options mean two new actors — Lexie Ann Kendrick and Ryan Highley — were brought in to provide new voice acting. Certain lines of dialogue have been rewritten across all eight available languages to modify explicit and implicit gender references to appropriately reflect whichever couple you pick.
Thoa provided some behind-the-scenes info as well regarding early concepts for Haven. At one stage, the plan was to feature eight different couples, but it was decided to focus on only one of them. As Thoa explains that “it became clear during production that we wouldn’t be able to reach our initial vision for the full cast of characters, so we focused on two characters only. The decision was tough to make, but it allowed us to craft a very unique and moving story about Yu and Kay.”
The free update is now available across every version of Haven: PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, Nintendo Switch, and PC.
