Developed by Squiddershins and published by Top Hat Studios, Kaichu – The Kaiju Dating Sim taps into these keen feelings for all sorts of fiends of the colossal kind. You play a kaiju who goes by the name Gigachu, a pink, softer pastiche of Godzilla who is on the prowl for love and is seeking out dates with other monsters.

When you start a new game, Kaichu already attempts to establish its intentions in good faith with the ability to select Gigachu’s pronouns with a plethora of many options to settle on for the rest of that file’s run (Gigachu’s default pronouns are chu/chu—but for the purpose of this review, Gigachu will be referred to with they/them). You are then immediately taken to a breaking news segment by a pair of newscasters, and after some light banter and riffing, their attention has been caught by the sightings of a kaiju now roaming about. This giant, pink reptilian—oh wait, that’s you, Gigachu!

Throughout the game, the newscasters comment on your escapades like a live play-by-play, feeding you instructions on what to do with their own interpretations and descriptions of what the monsters are doing on-screen. Given that the monsters do not speak, the newscasters phone in what exactly they may be seeing to each other, truly proving that love can even cross the boundaries of language. They explicitly explain the game’s controls and mechanics as you navigate Gigachu across an overworld map that is basically a condensed, simplified interpretation of our world. Various monsters are scattered about awaiting Gigachu’s charms, amidst the peppering of famous historical landmarks depicted in miniature form.

The prime objective of Kaichu is to develop a successful relationship. Once Gigachu initiates contact with another monster, they remain locked in as your one and only target for that playthrough. The game is a multi-act structure where you take your partner to the various landmarks—from places like the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt to the Space Needle in Seattle, Washington—and initiate “dates”.

Dates consist of a series of questions, assisted with the narration of the newscasters, that Gigachu must answer through a spectrum of emotes that pop up over their head. These emotes stand in for the more traditional responses of, “Agree”, “Neutral”, and “Disagree”. A successful response is met with the gradual destruction of the landmark, marking your progress. Along the way, the military tries to stamp down on all the collateral damage caused along your path.They are less of a literal antagonist that you have to confront one-on-one in gameplay, and more like a narrative force, their presence being suggestive to the escalation of the date questions’  increasing difficulty. All of this is pretty much the course of gameplay for the rest of Kaichu and every consecutive date is one step closer to progressing towards love or heartbreak.

As you make positive progress, you slowly complete a bestiary of the monsters, particularly focusing on your partner’s profile to get access to key information that could be useful in answering future date questions. This profile starts off with a preliminary bulleted list of tidbits such as likes and dislikes, and eventually reveals more complex pieces of information such as future ambitions and the potential conflicts that might get in the way of such. But here is where a particular flaw of Kaichu stands out: The system that Kaichu has to help you is not really interested in getting more in-depth than what the game ends up providing you beyond a shallow description and bulletpoint. There’s no concrete, conducive way to predict and strategize over what each monster likes to figure out the right choices you must make on these dates. There really is not a lot to work with when you are suddenly being confronted with loaded questions about raising a family when all you know is that your date likes to crush buildings.

Kaichu is a game that wants to reiterate simple, pleasant suggestions about what dating can be, but there are simply too many missing gaps within its gameplay mechanics that get in the way of what it’s trying to accomplish. For example, the monster of your choosing starts off as a complete blank slate at the start of each game. Sure, the mastery of conversation is actually paying attention to the context of dialogue, but there is really nothing to work with in the beginning, urging you to ironically judge your date’s appearance to figure out how they tick. For instance, Mossra, a plant-themed Mothra pastiche, is “national park personified”, and the answers to her date questions should favor horticulture and conservation of nature, but questions about looks, or whether you should kiss on the first date, barely rely on those sorts of visual clues.

Later on, you learn that Mossra has children, and therefore family matters are important to her, which suddenly becomes much more pivotal and important bits of info to consider as the questions previously to this stage were not as nuanced. Otherwise, you have to ride on the fact that her character design is based on a plant and that she must like plant things in her first couple of dates. It is a bit of a weak incentive to encourage multiple playthroughs. Even dating apps provide its users the means to build a foundation off of so they are not meeting someone blindly without some pretense of personality and preferences established.

Kaichu’s biggest strength truly lies in its presentation. From every bounce and step in the character animations, to small details like the ability to wreak havoc on the overworld map, Kaichu is a damn charming game. Although its flaws lie in its reductive approach to how dating works, its overall intentions urges you to approach meeting new people (and even monsters!) with kindness and an open heart. Anyone can find appeal in how lovable all of the character designs are and kaiju fans can appreciate all of the nods and passing references to the respective source material that each monster is inspired by.

Queen Seadora is a blatant reference to King Ghidorah, and although they both have three heads, they are different in a lot of obvious ways, with Seadora looking more like a cute Pokémon than a scary serpent. On the other hand, Garudon does not seem to be based on any specific monster, and even the in-game newscasters comment that he reminds them of several large, mythical birds of legend, like the roc. Garudon is designed as a bipedal, anthropomorphic bird, and at a glance, is likely taking a lot of design inspiration based off of colorful wrestler outfits and that of the flamboyant character costumes worn during Carnival.

I would compare Kaichu – The Kaiju Dating Sim to a nice refreshing sip from a well-chilled drink. It’s a pretty short game with a straightforward premise and it makes its point in that brevity. However, it is that brevity that makes me want to have more, but it sadly does not offer much more in its glass. It is ironic for the game to boast about communication and developing connections with others to get to know them better, when it was very limited in what it can do in that regard. On top of initial progress mostly needing to depend on a guessing game, given Kaichu’s repetitive gameplay, it can definitely use a little more content: There’s a whole lot of map that offers a lot of wiggle room for future updates, such as perhaps adding other giant creatures of yore and to shake off the tedium that is the game as it currently is.

Kaichu – The Kaiju Dating Sim is very much a game that knows and emboldens its identity through something that feels earnest in what it wants to do. It is nothing but a simple, lighthearted ode to kaiju, and sometimes, lighthearted is all you need when you’re busy crushing buildings to give your heart away.

The post Kaichu – The Kaiju Dating Sim (PC) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

Elvie shared a ride in the parlour with Dani (@danulmao), Kevin (@killkingjoy), and Alexis (@theswordwizard), several key members behind the development of dating sim, ValiDate: Struggling Singles in Your Area.

ValiDate hopes to fill a gap in dating sims and romance games when it comes to depicting actual, authentic experiences in the dating world as a person of color and with other fellow people of color. The team talks about the hurdles in producing an independent game without previous finance backing, on top of navigating around the hostilities against the creation of a game that goes against the norm.

You can subscribe to the Starlight Car on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, and Pocket Casts.

ValiDate: Struggling Singles in Your Area can be followed and wishlisted on Steam and itchio, and a Switch version of the game coming soon. Also, a playable demo is available on each of these platforms!

You can follow us on Twitter at @VGChooChoo. Elvie can be followed at @lvmaeparian and further developments on ValiDate can be followed at @ValiDateGame. Further support for ValiDate can be made through the team’s Patreon and Ko-fi.

The theme for Starlight Car is a “Super Chill Remix” of Aquamarine by Magic Circuit, which is available off their self titled album Magic Circuit. You can find their music on Bandcamp or follow them on twitter @magic_circuit.

The post Starlight Car Episode 9: Feeling Seen, and Feeling ValiDate’d appeared first on Gamesline.

In the city of New Sieg — a very blatant pastiche to New York City — you play a young journalist named Teuta looking for the latest scoop. After witnessing the death of an infamous “crooked” lawyer, and through her mysteriously innate ability to briefly travel back in time, she gets intertwined in all sorts of other shady characters and shenanigans in an effort to prevent his murder. Teuta ends up becoming an honorary member of the “Fixers”, a group of covert vigilantes with all sorts of skills and specialities who commit crimes to solve crimes.

BUSTAFELLOWS is pretty episodic, and each section essentially revolves around one case. The game presents itself like a TV serial, each chapter beginning with a brief opener (including a legal disclaimer that asserts the story and its characters are fictional) and a closing with a preview of what is to come next.

As an otome game, BUSTAFELLOWS has the sort of dating sim elements you’d expect. You can romance each of your “dangerous fellows”, each with completely normal everyday American names like “Limbo Fitzgerald” and stable, working careers like being a “hitman that silently eliminates hitmen”. These character-focused portions are actually playable separate from the game’s main storyline, and further divided into individual routes. However, you may extract information and acquire items from the game’s main storyline portion that can be helpful and have a potential impact in these routes.

Like other games of this ilk, you read through various scenes with much of the gameplay influenced by the decisions you make across a roster of choices in dialogue or actions. Some of these moments are timed, and these prompts do have explicit right or wrong answers. They’re usually a simple question testing your comprehension of the progress of the game thus far. For instance, you may be asked what was a character’s favorite restaurant mentioned in dialogue several scenes ago. Like other visual novel games, these choices influence where things will go from there.

One disappointment is that the time-hopping abilities unfortunately never come into play as a literal mechanic you can control on your own accord, and only functions during purely scripted moments in the narrative. It is definitely a wasted opportunity to not explore the concept of limited time traveling in clever ways, especially for a genre so reliant on choice-branching and manipulation. The main character’s abilities and her justification in using them reminds me of the early 90s television series Quantum Leap. Critics have often referenced it as America’s answer to Doctor Who despite its only true similarity with the latter being with the time traveling aspect. That said, Quantum Leap is more similar to BUSTAFELLOWS than Doctor Who, yet unlike either series the game does not let you even try to experiment with the moral implications of what time traveling can do.

BUSTAFELLOWS’ visuals are solid and at times are far more artistically thought out compared to what other otomes may be willing to do. The striking detail put into the backgrounds of the game capture incredible accuracy for something aiming to be an emulation of New York City. From the townhouse style apartment buildings with stoops to the right amount of convoluted signage and lighting in the game’s own imitation of Times Square, it was clear research was done that makes the settings so distinguishably inspired by the “Big Apple”. Small, looping animated details, such as flickering lights, add depth to many scenes.

The game also does some very minute, but interesting things that add dimensionality to the basic visual novel format. Character portraits have more varied poses I have not typically seen used in regularity in other similar games, which typically offer only a frontal pose facing the viewer. Some poses have just an extra added element to them, like a slight turn, which helps give more dimension to an otherwise static scene, or to transition into full-on, animated video where it needs to.

As opposed to many other titles of this sort, where the young, female protagonist is more or less forced by circumstance or pure coincidence into a situation that Stockholm Syndromes her into eventually falling in love with a bunch of strangers, BUSTAFELLOWS’ Teuta feels more realistic. She is able to stand firmly on her own as to why she is choosing to work within an unfamiliar world through her own beliefs that it will lead to the answers to many questions, such as figuring out the origins of her powers. Since the dating sim elements of the game are mechanically separate from the main game, romance is not even the game’s main priority and never something that overshadows the core conflicts at hand. The banter between all of the characters and their personalities are great, and everyone cohesively fits in with the world without overstepping one over the other on equal footing.

BUSTAFELLOWS is a game about found families and other connections made through the microcosms of a city. It is not only refreshing to see a romance game prioritize friendships, but also the same game that romanticizes city life outside of the typical binary of idealism and cynicism. A lot of games taking place in a city either depict it as a horrible place to live in or as some utopic, hipster paradise, but BUSTAFELLOWS manages to strike a balance between those two ends that is much closer to reality. In spite of all the bad things that happen, there are still many incredible people you can meet in unexpected places who will have your back, especially when you need it in the streets.

The game is by far not saying anything deep and transgressive of any sort, but by already reveling in a premise that revolves around seeking alternatives to a broken legal system, it takes a few steps above other otome titles tapping into some social commentary. It’s certainly not revolutionary in saying that sometimes you need to take justice into your own hands, but I was definitely caught off guard when it seemed like Teuta was about to go off on her cop friend on how corruption is so ingrained in existing systems that people should not be surprised that others will try to do unorthodox things to do a better job— which was all right in the dialogue when you first meet said character in the beginning of the game.

These critical sentiments towards the world have even more support towards the climax of the game’s first chapter, where another character comments that, “The world is unfair and unreasonable[….] [and] sometimes, things just don’t sit well with [me]”. They are defending the Fixers purpose and that a group like theirs needs to exist to just “fix those things a teensy bit”. BUSTAFELLOWS may not be mind-blowing, and where it hits the strongest is nothing unique, but it definitely has the working parts to it that make a whole machine work. But what if that machine just sometimes does not want to work the way it was programmed to do?

While BUSTAFELLOWS was originally released just for the Nintendo Switch in Japan back in 2019, this English language iteration on the PC, was unfortunately released in a less than stellar way. The most glaring issue, present from the moment you open this port, is how it mistreats what should otherwise be very crisp, beautiful visuals. The game’s image quality is ridiculously compressed, and it looks even worse when a video starts playing with all sorts of artifacts and anomalies abound. There is no way to adjust or tamper with this in the settings. In fact, the settings have nothing in them at all; you cannot do anything substantial besides playing around with sound.

So firstly, there are no display options. The game is not system DPI aware, which refers to its ability to scale and render according to the primary monitor settings I am using. It became problematic when it struggled to responsively adapt to my very square, unconventional monitor resolution. In spite of messing around with many things outside of the game to respond to issues that should be resolved in-game, I had numerous playthroughs where the game’s screen was extremely blown out because I have no idea how to fix it until it randomly does it itself at some point.

Secondly, you cannot remap the controls. Playing this game with a keyboard and mouse setup, I have also quickly learned that sometimes the game is not consistent about when I should be using my cursor or the arrow keys to navigate a screen. It does not give the cues on when to do so, let alone never providing what its default controls are. I also struggled with doing basic things at first, such as pulling up the menu and panicking over how to save the game, because the game has such an unconventional control schematic compared to other visual novels I had played, like using the Windows Function keys and or the navigation keys, like Home, End, and the Page Up and Down buttons. These are used to return to do things like return the menu screen, skip text, and save. (So if you don’t have those, or don’t have a Steam Link to override these, good luck!)

BUSTAFELLOWS on the PC is pretty busted. This is a game that was specifically developed for the Nintendo Switch in mind, and it is questionable whether there was any effort put into any proper optimization for a port, especially for a major international release. These ills do not override all the good parts of BUSTAFELLOWS, but it certainly makes a recommendation of the PC port impossible. This is especially upsetting to the spirit of visual novels, a genre of games that are often played and designed to be on a computer.

Although these grating issues are specific to the PC port, there was also some disservice made to the overall English language release of the game. BUSTAFELLOWS has remained faithful in keeping the Japanese language voice acting, which at times has been left untranslated for some reason. The dialogue has some ad libbing and improvisational lines performed by the seiyuu which are now at odds with the flow of the dialogue text on screen. As I am not fluent in Japanese, I have no way of knowing what the hell is going on or if I missed something significant that was added to a character’s performance. Whether this is a huge oversight or a deeply misguided idea, it is nevertheless an obstacle to accessibility.

This problem was especially egregious in the game’s prologue, where your main character is speaking with two completely different voices before you learn she was speaking through someone else’s body. At that point in time, you probably would not yet know she was time hopping. You have to go back in the game’s text logs to find out what has been actually said, so it is clear that these lines have been indeed translated, but they for some reason were not considered in the programming in the on-screen dialogue scenes they belong to.

Judging this game on the merit of what it actually has to offer, and not how it was presented on a platform that was not intended for it, BUSTAFELLOWS can be a bombastic blast. It romanticizes all these weird ideas of what an “American” aesthetic is with a fake American city, rooted in all these tropes from noir fiction applied to a contemporary setting. If you’re someone who likes anime series like Baccano!, Bungou Stray Dogs, and Blood Blockade Battlefront — in which case you likely also want to date some boys —  this game is for you. But if you also want a text-heavy game with just good character dynamics, straightforward mysteries, and a sweet found family narrative, this game is also for you!

BUSTAFELLOWS adds to the recent wave of otome games that continue the tradition of wallowing in cheesy tropes while being reminded that their audience will not stop aging: Past the cusps of cruel adulthood and more than willing to take in mature storylines, the otome game audience is now more than ever deserving of something more beyond the fantasy of a high school setting. In BUSTAFELLOWS’ case, why not fall in love with some weirdos while you’re trying to unveil the dark underbelly of the big city? After all, as crooked as the system is, you’ll be bound to run into some pretty freaks that intend on trying to fix it.

The post BUSTAFELLOWS (PC) Review appeared first on Gamesline.

Milky Way Prince – The Vampire Star opens up through the lens of a fairytale titled, “The Milky Way Prince”, which revolves around a boy who catches a fallen star. The boy becomes so overwhelmed by the star’s beauty and glow, he cries into it, and it evolves into a prince. The prince then whisks the boy away with him in an effort to save his kingdom in the sky.

Following the introduction of this tale, the game puts you in the perspective of Nuki, a young man who has an obsession with the stars. Nuki also dreams of romance, and he projects himself through the “The Milky Way Prince” story. One night, he ends up meeting Sune in a parallel fashion to the tale, just as the boy met the prince. The two quickly become infatuated with each other, and the rest of the game follows the course of development on what quickly turns out to be a very shaky, unstable relationship.

Typical to most visual novels, Milky Way Prince is a text-heavy game that gives you, the player, agency over a series of dialogue-based options you must choose to move forward. The game does not use a branching system, and instead uses a quota fulfillment mechanic of some sort, in which a certain selection of specific choices is what determines what route you will be directed to. Milky Way Prince also provides a schematic from the very beginning you can follow along to hint and track what path you are on throughout the remainder of the game. There are also interludes where you must intimately use your senses, as Nuki, to do things such as touch Sune or to examine your surroundings. These interludes are pivotal in discovering additional elements to the narrative and can even affect the direction of the story you are currently in.

The game is very stylish, incorporating a monochromatic black and red palette with minimalistic, 3D-rendered backgrounds to suggest scenery without overstepping and needing to imply any more detail than they need to. The flat, anime-inspired character art adds a surreal, dreamlike quality on top of these backgrounds, fitting for the abstract nature of the game especially when it becomes visually more eccentric at certain key points. Very subtle animation and lighting effects add depth to these scenes, all topped off with a dark, mellow, electropop soundtrack, disruptive and jarring when moments demand it to be unsettling. A lot of the game depends on not showing, but telling, which makes what would otherwise be visually graphic scenes all the more emotional and stirring. All these elements combined make up for what is ultimately a somber, and unsettling game.

With all that said, Milky Way Prince – The Vampire Star is extremely distressing and disturbing, and it warns you of this with caution before you may move forward playing. The game is semi-autobiographical, programmed and designed by Lorenzo Redaelli in an effort to create something that resounds his experiences with a similar relationship in which borderline personality disorder clouded it. This is not a game about constantly replaying over and over to find a perfect, happy outcome for two lovers, but is one about experiencing their tumultuous, painful journey to understand what potentially went wrong.

Because of this, in some ways Milky Way Prince is less of a visual novel and more of a linear story with very few interactive elements due to the inevitability of the game’s final outcome. Arguably, the game could be initially perceived to be a very narrow, negative view of what borderline personality disorder is, as if suggesting there is futility in having a romantic relationship with someone who has the condition.

However, I personally found it clear that the game was trying to make a point that the relationship depicted is a two-way street: in which Nuki’s over-romanticism of a toxic relationship is a huge factor in worsening Sune’s struggle. They both suffer huge lapses in their mental health in their own specific ways, and this combined does not help either of them and only fuels negativity. But this ambiguity might be belittling and may only raise more questions for an outsider, such as myself, especially to a very real issue that I think deserves more clarity from an educational standpoint. Given the game is short in playtime, we do not see fully in depth Nuki and Sune’s higher moments, and the duration of this relationship is not clear. I think if a longer glance into their relationship in times where it was consistently positive was brought into the foreground, the tragedy of its eventual collapse would have been made even stronger.

As previously described in regards to the game’s dreamlike nature, this ambiguity also grows more apparent later in-game. The hard line between fantasy and reality is blurred for purposefully artistic reasons to depict the characters’ struggles as external. An example of this is the visual link between Sune and moths. Moths are often symbolically associated with death and destructive qualities, and there are times where they suddenly appear on Sune’s skin when he has a moment where he lashes out. This might seem like an obvious symbol, but there is other imagery way more vivid and wilder than this that might not read immediately, making things confusing. At times, the game gets too artsy and experimental.

These accessibility issues are not limited to the game’s storytelling elements, but it’s technical elements as well. The game depends a lot on visual cues yet has epileptic elements to it that certainly shuts out some potential players (an aspect about it that is included in its warning prior to playing the game) and it depends on auto-saves despite it encouraging replayability to have multiple experiences. This makes replayability tedious, having to endure a repeat of scenes just to see where your path can divert.

In addition, I ran into a number of bugs and hiccups just even trying to run the game, all likely due to the game’s more eccentric elements sometimes clashing with its programming. In an initial playthrough of the game, there’s a segment where you must hover over a shape and click it to move forward. Not only is there no explicit instruction to do this, the clicking mechanic was not triggering for me in this run of the game. This can easily lead one to believe the game might have just crashed.

Milky Way Prince – The Vampire Star may not be accessible to everyone and it is also a game that I find difficult to recommend due to its heavy themes. I also think due to said themes that its execution could be more fleshed out and streamlined, leaving a few things left to be desired. Nonetheless, it is still a game that deserved to get made and we must encourage and thank creators, like Redaelli, for willingly putting out honest, vulnerable work as ways to heal from their own traumas.

If you are genuinely interested in the personal insight and dynamics of an unhealthy relationship, Milky Way Prince is something worth exploring, but this is not a game you should casually dip your toes in if you want to escape into a fantasy world and feel good. This is a game that thematizes serious issues that exist in our reality worth discussing. Games like these do not only exist in a bubble for pure escapism, but now more than ever they also serve as a productive medium to channel and offer diverse experiences worth sharing and educating others about.

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