Free Romance Games

[clyde]

So for those of you who don't read the Game Development forums

Bjorn

my game-making goal for 2015 is to experiment with episodic character-driven games with an emphasis on romance. So obviously I need to play romance-games. I don't want to buy any though. 

 

Discussion is incredibly helpful for me because it keeps me excited about stuff over a long period of time. Discussion of games also helps me learn from the mistakes and successes of others with much less effort than making them myself. I can get a lot out of putting my thoughts on a game into words, but hearing what other people have to say about them reminds me of how different everyone is (which is relevant because eventually other people will be playing the episodic character-driven games I make which emphasize romance). I think you get the idea. I'll be posting free romance-games here. If you have something to say about one of them, then please share.  If you find a free romance-game that you want to share, please post it.

[tegan]

Kindness Coins is mandatory.

[Jordan A]

I'd suggest Save the Date.

[clyde]

Kindness Coins is mandatory.

 

 

 

I think it's interesting how Kindness Coins is largely a good romance game because of the relationship between Florence and John even though they don't end up together. I get a utopian dream type of feel from the game. Sometimes when I approach problems of exceptionally large scope (such as patriarchy), I create a fictional utopian vision in which I demonstrate an optimal process of how something should work. Whether it is just drawing a city without the problem present or writing a story where it is dealt with well,  the creation of that piece helps me work out a few details of both the problem and potential solutions and making the art hacks my mind to make me feel like the problem is solvable enough to be worth working on. I get the impression that Kindness Coins is a project with a similar purpose, a modest depiction of wish-fulfillment. 

That's fine, Kindness Coins does a great job of pointing out how creepy it is when someone does you a bunch of favors without you asking, agrees with everything you say, and then expects payment. That is what this game is about, it's really an anti-romance. The interesting thing about it as an anti-romance is that the character interaction between Florence and John is more emotionally moving than the relationship between Florence and Daisy. This is helpful because I've never considered Mr. William Collins or Mr. Wickham as much more than souring alternatives that make Mr. Darcy look more appealing. Kindness Coins shows that providing high definition to all of the romantic relationships is a good idea regardless of whether or not they are ultimately successful. 

[clyde]

Save The Date was actually a prety good romance game which is surprising to me when I consider the game to be more about the format than the characters. It took me an hour to get to the point where Felicia solves the game by suggesting I quit and make up how it ends in my own mind (and I would have never gotten that  far if I hadn't read Emily Short's analysis of the game). 

 

 

Where I think it fails as a romance game is that I am supposed to be the person in love with Felicia and that doesn't happen, though I do like her more and more. I've decided that this is not what I want to do in making a romance game and there should be two distinct categories for romance games:

1. games where the player is suppossed to fall in love with an non-player character

2. games where the player gets lovey feelings from watching a romance between two non-player characters. 

 

Like I said, I'm going for option 2 and so it's hard for me to spend much time talking about whether or not Save the Date is successful with option 1. Still, there is a lot of useful stuff here. The most notable one is that Felicia is a character that I enjoy learning more about even though she isn't dynamic or nothing. She becomes aware of her own inevitable demise, but that doesn't change who she is. She does respond to it though and her response is what I find endearing. The player-character voice does an excellent job of displaying non-chalant humor about the entire thing, but the acceptance and reference to the fourth wall conflates my own voice with that of the player-character, so I find mysefl emptying the amount of personality there to fill it with my own and that diminishes the romance between them. 

I'm also interested in the wrist-grabbing power-fantasy that is demonstrated in Save the Date. While the player-character understands that they can't force Felicia into any specific behaviors or actions, there is still this massive about of dominance through multi-playthrough knowledges. The most interesting and compelling part of that aspect is Felicia's contributions towards her own coercion; the trust she puts into the player character is the most romantic part of the game. That is a useful demonstration.

[clyde]

I just played Finding A Prom Date. It took me a little less than an hour. 

 

 

I appreciated it being short and considering its length, it does accomplish a good amount. There are three potential dates that your character is remembering encounters with that occured during the last school year(s?). Tatsuya is a good friend who begins to like someone else romantically. Keiji is a bratty underclassman that Arisa can push around. Yuuto is a handsome player. Supposedly you can get one of them to go with you to the prom, but I was not successful at getting any of them to go to the prom with me. 

The relationships are developed about as well as I can imagine them being developed over the course of their alloted 15 minutes. They also feel distinct from each other in character just as much as they do in context. While I'm not particularly excited about this work, it is managing to do these two things that I want to be able to do in my games. 

Truthfully, I'd say that the most romantic parts of my play-through were my acceptance of Tatsuya's hooking up with a friend of mine instead of me, and bossing Keiji around and getting the sense that he liked it. I would have liked to see more of Tatsuya's relationship with Natsumi develop peripherally. That could have been the focus of the game in itself. You do get a good taste of this when they are first introduced, but then the lack of interaction between Arisa and Tatsuya (or Natsumi for that matter) is the main method of expressing seperation. I can respect that, but it would have been nice if I could have made some sort of gameplay investment to find out what's been going on between them. This love-triangle was the most interesting part of the narrative for me, but I didn't have much perspective on it. Still, the perspectives offered were appreciated. 

• I was able to introduce them and had the option to react jealously. 
• I was able to complain about the eventuality of the situation to a third party (Keiji). This aspect was actually the most brilliant thing that the game does. Having dialogues that reference Arisa's frustrations about Tatsuya and Natsumi with Keiji being contrasted with her actual responses to them when they were present, was where Arisa's character is expressed best. If Keiji had anything more to offer or if there had been later interaction with Tatsuya or Natsumi, a lot more could have been done in advancing a romance.
• The closing screen that implies I could have hooked up with any of the three evoked my imagination to fill in the blanks of how that could have happened and what I did wrong. This was a nice representation of the shy regret of a defeated crush. 

[TychoCelchuuu]

Even Cowgirls Bleed

Curtain

Cheek 2 Cheek

Digital: A Love Story

AGPPBP

You Were Made for Loneliness

With Those We Love Alive

Cooking, for lovers

[clyde]

Even Cowgirls Bleed

Curtain

Cheek 2 Cheek

Digital: A Love Story

AGPPBP

You Were Made for Loneliness

With Those We Love Alive

Cooking, for lovers

 

Thanks for the recommendations. I will slowly work my way through them. 

 

 

I just played Exquisite Corpses after reading Chris Priestman's Killscreen article. 

 

 

I was startled by how similar it was to Wrath of the Serpent.

 

 

Comparing the two is like watching two different couples fight. Both of these games give me a sense of revulsion and regret as they remind my of failings in moments of high emotion, but they offer different stylistic miscommunication which I find fascinating. In Wrath of the Serpent, the couple is expressing their frustration with each other with no concern for their demeanor and no perceived need for introspection; it initially feels raw and immature. Exquisite Corpse gives us chopped up dialogue that at first appears to be more mature and considerate, but it's totally not. There's lots of it's-not-you-it's-me, but there is no attempt at approaching specifics. The couple in Exquisite Corpse wants to think of themselves as adults who deal with their problems without ever attempting to actually do so. They use the vernacular of mutual understanding, but lack the drive to actually push their partner to dish. They don't really care if it works out, they just want to be able to say to themselves that they did. They've already decided that it's not going to work out because they can't see how that is possible from their individual perspective and they aren't really interested in being vulnerable enough to give their partner's perspective any real faith or think of it as applicable. The slow music really cements this for me; it's as if these two want to believe that they live in a melodrama. I think it would have been a great creative choice to have a rain-storm come in the latter half and then go to the trouble to animate one of them getting out and walking. I can see the couple in Wrath of the Serpent managing to stay together after emotions subside, but the couple in Exquisite Corpse is composed of arrogant types who are unlikely to ever admit that they may need to accept the other person's reality and respect it. They use their sadness to affirm the depth they want to perceive in their own personalities; as they walk away from each other thaey think to themselves, "This will be a great life-experience to draw from for the novel I'll eventually write".

 

So what I take away from these two games is that if I include relationships that don't work out, it should be expressed with a whimper rather than a bang. If I want them to have a fight that they eventually recover from, it will be more like Wrath of the Serpent. 

[clyde]

I just played Human Needs after my wife discovered Noyb's write-up on Zero Feedback and it reminded me that I wanted to play it. 

 

 

Even though the game's description on its itch.io page categorizes it as a love-story, I didn't really see it as such until a good ways into the game. What I like about this romance is how it manages to express itself successfully while remaining largely unstated. I reached a fail-state because I was unwilling to beat anyone or live with a fascist in order to satisfy my need for violence, but in the time up until my character's death I felt that my character developed a genuine romance with the Christopher Knight leather-chair. 

The narrator has a distinct voice that seems built of a soft, impressionable credulity to maintain the ability to evoke empathy within the world's anthropomorphism that the reader is also encouraged to laugh at the absurdity of. And this is the voice which must convince us that a romance is occurring; it's possibly a well-suited voice for this task now that I think about it. Since the Christopher Knight leather-chair is a passive object, the romance is constantly in danger of feeling one-sided, but through believable narrative devices of selective and/or symbolic happenstance, we get the sense that the chair may be passive, but is willing and even excited about the partnership. THis is difficult for me to recognize as a type of romance because it is so different than my own tendencies in romantic attraction. I don't have the confidence for a passive partner. I would imagine that this is the default relationship in computer-games, but whether or not it is novel, Human Needs pulls it off. The technique used is a depiction of escapism, moments of exposure over a period of time to something attractive and fulfilling in some mundane sublimity. The Christopher Knight leather-chair becomes an alternative tied to unfulfilled lust, it's a magical pixie dream chair. As such, the narrator's accepting voice has only the player character's actions and feelings to provide us with a glimpse into the romance. Typically I would see this as a shallow depiction of a relationship. but here it is kinda cute. It's like when I heard that story about the couple that has lived in mountainous wilderness and it focuses on the individual who builds miles of stairway over the course of decades for the other. Even though it is (in some ways) the story of one side's sacrifices, there appears no lack of love. Human Needs provides me of an example of this. 

[Ninety-Three]

I'm also interested in the wrist-grabbing power-fantasy that is demonstrated in Save the Date. While the player-character understands that they can't force Felicia into any specific behaviors or actions, there is still this massive about of dominance through multi-playthrough knowledges. 

 

To me, that was the most interesting part of the game. Eventually I had played through every branch of the game, proving to myself that there was no way to "win". I'd seen Felicia's speech about making up your own ending, and I found that to be very unsatisfying (for roughly the same reasons as Emily Short, based on my skimming of her piece). You know how at the very beginning, there's the option to call off the date? I clicked it accidentally on one of my early playthroughs, and it told me "Game over. You didn't even get a date." Once I'd explored every path, I don't remember why, perhaps by accident again, I took the option to cancel the date, and I got a surprise that felt like the "real" ending to the game, and an interesting commentary on the power-fantasy.

 

I didn't get the same "Game over, you didn't even get a date". I don't recall the exact text, but instead the game told me how she was disappointed, how we tried to reschedule the date but never did, we eventually grew apart, and I later learned that she married someone else. At the end of that, it commented "Maybe it's for the best."

 

It's text that you only get once you've seen all her deaths, and it makes for this really interesting story that isn't just telling the player character they can't have what they want, but with the line "Maybe it's for the best", it communicates a sense of acceptance and moving on, in a way I found absolutely perfect.

[clyde]

Once I'd explored every path, I don't remember why, perhaps by accident again, I took the option to cancel the date, and I got a surprise that felt like the "real" ending to the game, and an interesting commentary on the power-fantasy.

I didn't get the same "Game over, you didn't even get a date". I don't recall the exact text, but instead the game instead told me how she was disappointed, how we tried to reschedule the date but never did, we eventually grew apart, and I later learned that she married someone else. At the end of that, it commented "Maybe it's for the best."

It's text that you only get once you've seen all her deaths, and it makes for this really interesting story that isn't just telling the player character they can't have what they want, but with the line "Maybe it's for the best", it communicates a sense of acceptance and moving on, in a way I found absolutely perfect.

It's like at the end of Harry and the Hendersons where someone in the relationship scares the other one off for their own good, still crushed themselves by the separation.

[clyde]

I just played With Those We Love Alive. 

 

 

I played it a few months ago but I didn't have enough ground in order to appreciate it as much as I did the second time. I enjoyed it the first time, but because it can often feel unresponsive (Save the Date can also feel this way for different systemic reasons) I didn't have the patience to appreciate a lot of what it has to offer. I was enraptured by the world as the politics and threats on a personal scale excited me. I didn't really pick up on romance at all; I didn't even have a sense of a convincing friendship. So when TychoCelchuuu recommended it in this thread I was confused, but trusting. 

Playing it with a good understanding of how time progresses mechanically and looking at in a romantic context greatly increased my enjoyment of With Those We Love Alive. 

The majority of the story is spent establishing the role/duties and reputation of the protagonist after separation with the friend has occurred and the original relationship feels ambigious for the most part. Certain specificity is presented once in a while to add persuasiveness to the relationship between the friends, showing that it existed with in manifested detail and establishing a relatability for the reader in this phantasmagoric world. 

When considering this game as a romance, all of this build up (the world, the politics, the personal history, the threats, the duty, the pomp) can be seen as something for the hallucinagen-scene to kick off of. The scene where old friends remember their trust, forged in shared suffering, puts everything else into perspective. This is most certainly a form of love, a romance and Porpentine accomplishes the denotion of it extraordinarily well.

When an old friend of mine comes near, it can be stressful because my role has changed in the time since they were around. I'm invested in the decisions I've made while they were away and it can feel that my old role and my new role are competing. The most succint example of this in my personal experience is one time I came back to town from college and got picked up by my friend Dan who was still in highschool. We drove out to a strip-mall chinese restaurant where our friend Katie was working. She comes to our table and is like "Do y'all want some food?" Dan looks around and says "No, do you want to come with us?" Katie looks around at the situation and says "Sure", quits right then, and we went on an adventure. My old friends will most likely win that battle you know? That's romance. 

So why? Why does it work that way? Well in the garden-scene I think that the case is made. There is a freedom that comes from the unreasonable sense of security that some friends can give you. In that protection, you can take off the uniform and remove the ranks you've earned in order to get about within the current, local system of resource-allotment. When that happens the control-orientated part of your being that gets you the shit you need can be replaced with a vulnerability, a state of receptiveness. It's child-like. And in that receptiveness, one may look around at the set which has felt so oppressive since so many things have been negotiated over time, and it just becomes matter. It's just bullshit. The uniform becomes silly as soon as you take it off and your friend jokingly pretends to wear it themself. The stuff that you thought was making decisions for you becomes a material that can be used for that, or any other purpose. I know it sounds corny, but this is one of the powers of love.