If you’re new to the world of OROBORO and the Occult Triangle Lab, you’re probably thinking something like:
Dark fantasy—cool.
Body horror—cool.
Worldbuilding—cool.
What’s all this about a dating sim?
Black Heaven: A Necromantic Dating Sim was one of the Lab’s first major projects (and our first successful Kickstarter). It’s a psychological horror dating sim, set in the world of OROBORO, although in an alternate timeline where a cancerous disease has ravaged the world.
The player character, Uzo, is a former immortality scholar who travels back to the ruins of his academy to track down the ghosts of his old friends and bargain them to a grinning, eyeless chronomancer for a chance to live his life over again. Along the way, his mind slips between the desolate present and memories of the past, until the line between reality and madness begins to blur.
You might be thinking that this sounds more like Silent Hill than a dating sim, and that’s the point. For me, most dating sims seemed to be about wish fulfillment, but I realized that they don’t have to be—in fact, romance can be the vector to explore all kinds of things, because, arguably, everyone wants love.
In Black Heaven, romance became a way to explore the flaws in the hearts of people and whether those people can change.
It also became a way to explore horrors—psychological and supernatural. Ghosts in this world are warped reflections of who they were in life, so part of the story has the protagonist encountering these monstrous versions of his old friends and persuading them to trust him.
The narrative was designed to shift in nightmarish ways if you kept trying to change your decisions by loading a previous game, reflecting how the protagonist’s memories are gradually fraying. It also reflects one of the key themes of the game—that you have to live with the mistakes of the past.
Woven throughout all of this is the pursuit of immortality, one of the key elements of OROBORO. Here’s how one reviewer described it:
…the entire point of the story is to achieve immortality. Or is it? It seems as though every story written about humans achieving immortality is actually about why trying to do so is a fool’s errand. Black Heaven is no different. There is a hunger, a certain gnawing at the edges of every living being, but some measure of growth and happiness can only be gained when that hunger is shed.
I know most fans of the Lab are going to take one look at Black Heaven, go “That’s weird”, and move on. Fair enough. Any piece of media that claims to let you ‘date’ the fictional characters in it is still a strange proposition (especially when those characters are Colonel Sanders or Hanzo from Overwatch).
But if you like the stories I write, the worldbuilding material I create, and the themes I explore, consider giving Black Heaven a chance.
Leave a Reply