Recent reviews by gackt vevo

I honestly wanted to like this game. The idea of a multiplayer dating sim is genuinely enjoyable – but this specific game seems to take every possible chance to make an otherwise potentially fun experience into a miserable slog, ESPECIALLY for people playing online.

First of all, and I think this is the most objectively awful thing about this game: if you are playing online and one of your friends is on an internet connection that is anything less than 100% absolutely concrete stable with NO hiccups whatsoever, your game will lose connection and all of your progress will be lost immediately. You will have to start from the beginning. Every time.

I understand netcode is a difficult thing to implement, and I think it was admirable for the dev team to attempt it, but the fact that there are no save points as a failsafe for less than stellar connections is baffling to me.

If you and your friends tend to play online only, avoid this game completely. Do not even consider it.

On a more personal note, if you respect yourself, avoid this game completely. As a gay man myself, I was honestly excited to try a dating sim that allowed me to be gay. Sure, the two humanoid male characters you can choose from seem to have been drawn from the same base and have the same exact body shape (and the other one is a “funny robot” which is really more of a kick to the face than anything, given that all of the female characters are still humanoid with varied bodies), but whatever.

At this point I literally can’t be picky, there’s basically nothing out there for me in regards to dating sims. But I would have rather just avoided this game entirely than having hope, which isn’t to say I was expecting anything serious. Just anything at all would have been nice.

This game is very strange to me in that even though you are able to choose your pronouns, your sexuality is pre-determined and cannot be changed. That is to say, you are assumed to want to ♥♥♥♥ absolutely everything in this game regardless of gender. That means that if you’re gay, lesbian, or even straight you’re just kind of screwed in terms of representation.

The game, from what I could tell with its honestly garbage writing (more on this later) seems to want to be as inclusive as possible, even to the point of feeling condescending, but locks you into this forced sexuality with no remorse, reminding you of how hot you find women almost every other line despite what you may think in real life.

That’s a surefire way to pull me the hell out of a game’s writing, even if it’s not trying to be serious. I’ve played visual novels for straight guys that don’t feel the need to remind me that women are hot to the extent this game does. And yet “LGBTQ+” is the second tag for this game.

Sure, you can be a guy and date a guy. But you also desperately want to ♥♥♥♥ everything else, so I honestly don’t find it any different from playing games for straight men or straight women. My sexuality is still misrepresented in the end.

That’s not to say I was expecting to get legitimately attached to any of the characters in this game. The art style is subpar by my standards, with the art direction falling fully down the “women are curvy, and men are only made of squares and rectangles” hole. It’s not for me at all, but I understand that’s a very subjective opinion, and I can tell that there is some visual polish here.

However, even if I did find any of the characters attractive, I would absolutely be turned away by the writing. Each character has a single trait, and I do truly mean a single trait. The witch girl is a witch, that’s her personality. The buff girl is strong, that’s her personality. The skeleton guy is vain, the demon guy is an arsonist, etc.

Calling these characters even two dimensional would be a stretch. Their one trait seems to be the basis for every single line of dialogue they have. It’s bizarre as the dialogue tends to stretch onwards for uncomfortable amounts of time (odd decision for a multiplayer game) yet manages to say absolutely nothing because it largely consists of each character repeating their sole trait.

My first interaction with the buff woman (who I was assigned to despite not being interested in women) was almost entirely her talking about how she wanted to beat up capitalism. For paragraphs on end. Oh, that reminds me…

Outside of the character writing (if you can call it that), the game seems to pride itself on what I can only generously call a “Tumblrpoisoned sub-Netflix Original” style of writing. The game advertises itself as having “unapologetic writing”, which in this case means it will absolutely beat you over the head with amazingly hot political takes such as “capitalism bad”. How brave, how unapologetic. What a hot take I’ve never heard before. Thank god it repeats it ad nauseum for minutes on end, otherwise I don’t think I’d be able to understand it.

The game treats you (and the characters themselves, for that matter) as if you are a brainless child with no actual takes on the world you live in, having to hammer its milquetoast messages into your head through constant repetition. A bizarre contrast to the amount of seemingly “adult” content in the game, such as the word ♥♥♥♥ and repeated mentions of sex.

It becomes tiring almost immediately, and slowly turns very awkward as you have to stop and wonder if these allegedly adult characters are acting like preteens on purpose, or if the writing is truly that bad.

I am not saying this game needs to take itself seriously. The core concept of the game is very silly, and I understand that. It’s a party game after all! But the game seems so utterly desperate to make you laugh that it’s just embarrassing. When it’s not serving you childlike “horny” dialogue or repeating a pathetically meek political stance (sorry, I mean unapologetic), it’s relying on outdated memes and corny internet jokes.

There was an unbelievably long segment of the game wherein Bill Murray appears as a character – that’s the joke. You’re supposed to find just that one thing funny, for literal paragraphs of dialogue. It went on for so long that all I could think about was how ashamed I was to be subjecting my friends to this. It wasn’t even so bad or so absurd that it was funny, it was just really sad to think that whoever wrote this section of the game probably thought it was the funniest thing ever.

I don’t think I’ve ever had my friends seem this joyless before in any game. It’s an awful thing to subject others to, but I have to imagine that playing it alone is maybe one of the most crushingly depressing experiences one could have since the game is so empty otherwise.

As a side note, I would like to mention the music. Music is a core component of almost every game, after all. This game seems to have exactly one surf rock track (or at least multiple tracks that sound unbelievably similar). For the entire game. It’s infuriating. My friends and I had to mute it entirely halfway through as we felt like we were losing our grip on reality. I am amazed that a game was able to be sold like this on top of the lack of care for the online mode.

I love dating sims and visual novels. I’ve even played other multiplayer dating sims before and had a great time. Games like this are not at all representative of the genre. It’s very sad to me that an otherwise cute idea is completely wasted on cheap jokes and disrespect towards individual sexualities.

I could see a lot of potential in this game if it had a completely new writing team and a simple save system. But as it is it’s just very, very sad. A disingenuous bundle of outdated humor to slowly unpack in front of your friends – until somebody disconnects, of course!

TL;DR: The online aspect of this game is fundamentally broken, and the writing is unfathomably bad and outdated. Try something else.