It's that time of year and as the Halloween scares start to kick in, Wales Interactive hit back with a new FMV horror experience, detailing and dating their found-phone title, Simulacra.
Romancelvania’s dating sim half is frivolous fun, but its other half, the Metroidvania, drunkenly crashes the party. It ungracefully stumbles about, throwing up on the couch. We certainly know which of the two halves we’d choose to evict, come voting time.Â
Flower Shop: Summer in Fairbrook isn’t one of Ratalaika’s finest visual novels. It tries to marry a farming sim to a dating sim, and leaves both sides half-grown.
While the two genres in Boyfriend Dungeon dovetail nicely, they don’t stand up to scrutiny themselves. The hack-and-slashing is a callow shade of games like Hades, and the dating sim stuff is fine, but lacking in any emotional reaction: we failed to laugh, love or loathe. It may not be the sleazy sim that many have imagined, but it also fails to trigger a reaction other than a shrug emoji.
It might be easy to dismiss Sable’s Grimoire as a visual novel take on Harry Potter. It’s even easier to dismiss as a dating sim. But it’s laced with teenage anxiety and social commentary, which builds on the Hogwarts foundations and ends up as a dating sim, almost by accident. It’s not without its cliches and melodrama, but Sable’s Grimoire is a rich, effective visual novel that fans of the genre will fall in love with.
I've never played a game like Later Daters, and the whole concept of an elderly dating sim is something I wouldn't have thought anyone would be thinking about creating or playing. But the development team have managed to make something that isn't a dating sim, but a narrative adventure that focuses on being old; ridding the stereotypes that affect it. The game isn't afraid to deal with some hard subjects - and some taboo ones - and it’ll certainly make you open your eyes and think about matters a little more.
Back in 2022 we mixed dating with farming, with Flower Shop: Summer in Fairbrook. But now the winter chills come in with release of Flower Shop: Winter in Fairbrook.Â
Our problem with Motesolo: No Girlfriend Since Birth is that we have already played the more satisfying - but still similar - Five Dates and Ten Dates.
