 Day six, Secret Little Haven, suggested by Fabi Garza and seconded by a whopping 24 people, including myself. Oops, sorry, I have preferences too. I never meaningfully experienced the internet as it's depicted in Secret Little Haven, but I came pretty close. I was online in May of 1999 before Google changed everything, but I didn't find my first real community until late 2003, maybe early 2004, which was the comment section on nerutofan.com. We were past the age of guest books, but the core group was small enough that we recognized each other, every time a new chapter or bit of news dropped, and it sunk its hooks into me just as the fan site for Secret Little Haven's Sailor Moon of sorts, Pretty Guardian's Love Force did its protagonist, Alex. Secret Little Haven is a visual novel, but it doesn't really feel like one because of the setting. This game is one of those that exists in its own operating system, one that harkens back to the something old days of Max called Symphony OS. It's got a few programs for you to poke around in, some critical to completion, a chat client browser that goes nowhere but the aforementioned fan site, and even a command line that you can use to open all of them if you don't feel like double clicking. And then some are just there to make the experience richer, like the Tomagachi knock off that reminded me that I had a pocket Pikachu back in 1999. This game reminded me of a lot of things. For example, did you know that in late middle and early high school, I thought I was bisexual? It took me a long time to understand attraction and how finding a feminine anime boy hot doesn't actually mean I want to consensually experience real human penises, which I can assure you I absolutely don't. But while those anime boys may have confused me sexually, the anime girls in Pretty Guardian Love Force confuse Alex genderily. Because I knew going into it that the story was being told through a trans feminine perspective, I assumed the big picture. I would be playing a trans girl who is still figuring out what that means. And I wonder what would happen if someone played this game without knowing that? I think they'd be worse for it. Like it really is important to know upfront that Alex is questioning her gender because you are her. And if you aren't on the same page, I think the first chapter would lose a lot of its impact. If you don't understand why she would hesitate the first time someone calls her a girl or a conflict when someone else calls her a boy, you're going to have trouble responding in a way that makes sense. Which is the game portion of this interactive storytelling experience, or at least most of it. You receive messages from a handful of characters like your best friend who is having their own conflicts, your douchey childhood friend who wants you to be more of a man, two characters from the Pretty Guardians fan site who are in college and can therefore impart their ancient wisdom to you, and your dad. And then you respond to them. Sometimes you just have one thing to say, but often there are two or three choices in more emotionally fraught moments. You'll see choices, but they all say the same thing. And these conversations will range from light-hearted to straight up devastating, especially when your dad comes online and the bright colors and sounds of sanctuary OS are replaced with drab and grating tones as you are berated by a man whose only concern is his own legacy. And when you see how your attempts to appease him are twisted by his vortex of narcissism, oh my god, it made me so angry. But like in a good way, or at least intentional, it felt like having a real conversation, albeit with a brick wall. It's kind of incredible how real the people on the other side of the screen feel all the way down to the pauses between messages that simulate their typing. And there are times where you juggling these conversations you might be talking to Sammy and then see that Laguna's got something to say, but you're not done with Sammy. So you go back and try to be as engaged as possible in both conversations because you don't want to disappoint either of them, because it would be rude to make them wait. The fact that they're not real doesn't matter in the moment. I couldn't let them down. And all of this brought me away the fuck back. Obviously, I have not had these particular conversations before, but I had years of messages that read just like them. One of your first choices is how to emote confusion. Do you look left, right, or down? And while I know you see me as this handsome 30-year-old pillar of grace and wit, I'll tell you what, I saw those options and became that awkward 12-year-old with awful bangs trying to let a total stranger on MSN Messenger know that I knew that they knew that I knew that I was awkward all the heck over again. I don't know what it says that the dialogue options often let me be a near-carbon copy of the person I was half my life ago, but it sure was odd how easily I slipped back into it, how natural it was to be Alex more or less as a younger Alec. And in that sense, what creator Victoria Rose has done here is phenomenal. I was hooked basically from the word go and remained so throughout. The couple of oddities where it seemed like language wasn't quite tweaked to account for different dialogue options, ain't nothing. Frankly, the writing is unassailable. But while everything I just said is true, I was often frustrated when the rest of the game came into play. Sometimes you're forced to do some other thing in order to progress the conversations, and these people I don't want to disappoint will wait forever while you figure out how to address a digital doll or check your email or whatever. And I understand like bigger picture that Rose wants you to see all of the things that she's made. I didn't even realize what the male client was until I had to use it to look something up. And then I got to get more character stuff from checking out the rest of the inbox. But the reason I didn't know was because I stopped snooping around after the first day, because I dug through the fan site and found the link to my local theater to see when the Pretty Guardians movie was showing before the dialogue forced me to tell Sammy that I didn't know that local movie theaters had websites at all. That kind of shit breaks immersion in a really frustrating way and told me that I shouldn't be exploring unless I had been given permission to do so. So I didn't. Though that's nothing compared to the terminal, a program that as in real life gave me no fucking end of grief. Every single thing I had to do with the terminal took about five times longer than it should have because I didn't really understand how it worked. Rose's exceptional writing unfortunately didn't extend to documentation and my inability to use it properly came perilously close to ruining the entire thing for me when the big climactic sequence just didn't work the way I thought it would. What should have been affecting was actually just annoying and made worse when I finally turned to a walkthrough and learned that actually the game had glitched out and the button that I needed to end the sequence just just wasn't there. I had to quit and restart it. But while everything I just said is true, so what? When I look back on this experience I'm not going to think about the moments where the game got in the way of the story. I'm going to think of how the story damn near brought me to tears. I'm going to think of the conversations that I had with Laguna and reading through Alex's fanfic and telling Andy that he needs to calm the fuck down. I'm going to think about the way that Victoria Rose fulfilled the promise of the name and created this small self-contained world that someone can go and get totally lost in for the few hours it'll take them to see the whole thing through. It really is a secret little haven for Alex and for me. 8.9 out of 10. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you particularly to my patrons, my mom, Hammery and Marco, Kat Saracotta, Benjamin Schiff, Anthony Cole, Magnolia Denton, Elliott Fowler, Greg Lucina, Kojo, Phil Bates, Willow, I am the sword, Riley Zimmerman, Claire Bear, Taylor Lindyce and the folks who'd rather be read than said. If you liked this video, that's great. If you want to see more, suggest the one to do in three days in the comments. Awesome, cool. Looking forward to it. Bye.