An Acquired Taste for Dating Sims
Originally published March, 2019Dating simulation games have existed for a long time and have long since been the butt of many jokes when it comes to video game genres. They're relatively simple in their design and construction. They primarily depend on the quality of the writing, which is something video games continue to struggle with. Not to mention, the typically simple design of a dating sim makes it easier for more and more developers to create their own, which has led to an overwhelming flood of them on the market. A quick search of games on Steam or a game database with the genre tag and you'll find there aren't enough hours left in your lifetime to play every one. Perhaps the biggest common criticism I've heard railed against the genre, however, is that dating sims are contrived: a structural series of interactions that are meant to make other characters fall in love with the player, or, in some cases, have sex with them.
All these criticisms are perfectly valid in their own right. Bad dating sims can be little other than an unfortunate vessel for someone to channel their misguided attempts at human interaction. At worst, they could be confusing the player into believing that the method of human courtship in the video game is the same as it is in real life. What is a real social interaction if it's not a series of multiple-choice questions where there is one correct path that leads directly to sex, after all?
If you reduce everything down, dating sims are just basically multiple-choice quizzes that, when all the "correct" answers are combined, give you a specific outcome. This grand outcome was crafted by someone else and is meant to release that cathartic sense of accomplishment and love as though you were able to convince a perfect stranger to become more socially and emotionally involved. Nothing can replace true life, but some dating sims still attempt it. Some dating sims try to pull that same emotional experience into fantastic, unbelievable, Anime worlds. Again, there is no shortage of these types of games available on digital storefronts.
All that being said, there are still diamonds in the rough. I'm not a big dating sim enthusiast, but I have still watched and played a few myself over the years. In the past few years, there have been a number of different dating sim games that have popped up that I have tried or watched and enjoyed thoroughly. The main examples I'm thinking of are: Hatoful Boyfriend, Doki Doki Literature Club, Dream Daddy, and House Party. Each one of these dating sim games is wildly different from the other, but they all have the following traits in common:
Funny
Has a hook or something that makes it different
Self-aware
Has more to the "goal" than simply romance or sex
All of these qualities vary in their degrees of importance from game to game, except for the first, which is also the hardest to pull off. Writing for video games is difficult, and writing comedy for video games is even more difficult. There are very few examples of video games that were genuinely funny from start to finish solely because of the writing. However, if you can pull it off, people remember the game for it (like the Portal games), and dating simulators are easy examples of a genre that would benefit from good comedic writing.
Regardless, these traits are what I am looking for in a dating simulator these days. These traits not only separate the uniquely good from the typical trite, but they also are easily highlighted in the series of examples I selected. So to demonstrate how the traits operate, let's take a quick at each example game.
Hatoful Boyfriend
Hatoful Boyfriend's comedy comes more from its premise and the bizarre nature of the situation. It creates comedy out of the matter-of-fact attitude that all the characters have about the situation. The situation, by the way, is that you're the last known human around and you're in high school interacting with potential mates. Who are your mates? Sentient male pigeons of different breeds.
Known in short-hand as the "pigeon dating-sim," Hatoful Boyfriend leads you down a bizarre path. The interactions would be considered perfectly normal, if the world and the circumstances were. However, many of the more bizarre details are slowly revealed over time after the initial shock of having a deep conversation with a bird has worn off. Eventually, the story takes an incredibly dark and ominous turn, straight out of Murder She Wrote. It still follows the structure of a dating sim, in which you are making choices and talking to specific characters to get to know them to better flush out a story.
It all works because the game knows how ridiculous it all is and intentionally throws details or circumstances at you that are more and more surprising to make sure you're never too comfortable. Just when you're starting to feel like you might understand how to properly date these pigeons, something new happens to make you second-guess every answer. It's stupid, funny, and brilliant. In fact, it might be the precursor to all the others on this list as the first really weird dating sim of recent memory to garner popularity outside of the typical genre fanbase for its comedy and goofiness.
Doki Doki Literature Club
Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC) is similar to Hatoful Boyfriend in both its tone and style. While the girls whom you are courting are anime characters instead of birds, they are all unique in their own way. While Hatoful Boyfriend is a more subtle attempt at mocking the genre, DDLC takes a more direct approach of parody. It's an anime dating sim with a bunch of archetypes, but all the archetypes have some sort of dark or horrific trait to them that makes it almost something of a horror game.
Friendly, cute girls with colored anime hair and bubbly personalities are secretly thinking of how to murder you in a fit of adoring passion, end themselves, or just kill any competition that might stand between them and you. Thus, the interactions are all much different from the typical methods of courtship when you know that each sentence may have an ominous undertone. Of all the examples, this is the one I've seen the least, but I know that even if the interactions were specially crafted, they at least set themselves apart from the genre it's parodying.
Dream Daddy (Review)
Of all the examples I've listed, this is probably the most genuine game of the bunch. Dream Daddy is self-aware and it has its novelty hook, but the quality of the writing is what sets the game apart from others. In many ways, it's the most traditional dating sim on the list, yet it has plenty of qualities that make it stand out. In Dream Daddy, you're a single dad with a teenage daughter who is getting ready to leave the nest and go off to college. This is a situation that provides a great deal of material for character interaction—if properly written—and it is the core plotline that moves the game along between the dates you go on. Who are you dating? Other dads in the neighborhood.
This would be a cheap novelty hook at comedy in less deft hands, but Dream Daddy doesn't really focus on the fact that all the dads in the neighborhood are, at the very least, bi-curious. The game doesn't really rely on the hooks or the self-awareness in the same way that the other games in the list do. It relies more on good storytelling, character development, and genuinely funny jokes. It's still a dating sim, but it's one that functions more as an interactive novel with the goal being to simply understand these characters and their complexity better. If more dating simulators were as well-written and thought-out as Dream Daddy, parodies like Hatoful Boyfriend and DDLC wouldn't stand out as much or feel as necessary.
House Party
Okay. If Dream Daddy is the Shakespearian example of dating simulators, then House Party is the dating sim equivalent of Tromeo and Juliet. Dream Daddy to House Party is like Batman to the Toxic Avenger, or Pirates of the Caribbean to Cutthroat Island, or The Matrix to any Uwe Boll film. If you don't understand any of the analogies, simply put: House Party is the trashy bad-movie equivalent and I love it. However, that's not to say that there isn't some brilliance here. House Party is one of the funniest games I've played in a long time, due both to the writing and to the very bizarre nature of the experience. Since the game is still in an early access state, it is a buggy mess, which can also create its own comedy.
The goal of House Party is to introduce yourself to everyone at the party and try to have sex with as many of them as possible, which will likely require that you be a terrible human being in the process. The clever disclaimer that appears when the game first loads should be all you need in order to understand how self-aware it is because the game's creator certainly seems to understand. Unlike traditional dating sims, House Party is all about getting sex and using somewhat skeezy or nefarious means to do so. It's a bit of dark commentary on the nature of the genre itself—and people in general—by making the ultimate goal about fornication and giving you such dirty methods of accomplishing it. It doesn't play well with the politically correct crowd, but I love it for its offensively clever humor and absurd nature.
It's also the only one of the dating sims I've listed that is also something of a three-dimensional point-click adventure game where you have to find items and combine them or give them to NPCs to complete "quests." Even though the goal of the protagonist is sex, there are some funny and interesting character stories that you can unlock by trying different dialogue choices and following different opportunities. With all the systems operating beneath the surface, all the moving characters with AI, and wonky physics in the world, there are a lot of things that can and do go wrong due to the early state of the game. However, most of those disasters can still lead to some hilarious moments.
Also, the sex is very explicit and the moments of intercourse in the game cannot be skipped even if you'd like them to be. So if you don't want a game that could be classified as porn in some regards, you may want to stay away from House Party.
The Genre as a Whole
If my list should be any indication to those familiar with the dating sim genre, it should be that I don't really like dating sim games in the traditional sense. Perhaps I'm too much of a cynic or too easily bored by simple character interactions that involve me doing specific scripted steps if there isn't something else going on. Those sort of interactions work fine for me in Bioware games like Dragon Age or Mass Effect because they're tertiary to the whole game. I have plenty of other things to do when I get bored with the dialogue conversations that go nowhere or just lead to an awkward video game sex scene that gets mentioned on Fox News.
If anything, Dream Daddy is the one that I've played that felt like a legitimately well-crafted experience that I wanted more of. It's still a series of character interactions that require I follow the necessary steps to properly court my date, but there's enough depth to the characters and the plotlines that I'm compelled to keep playing. Of the four I've mentioned, I've played more of Dream Daddy and House Party simply because of how there's so much more going on beyond the core dating sim experience.
Nonetheless, I'm always open to trying new things so if you know any good ones that stand out above the rest, leave them in the comments and I'll check them out for myself.
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