After my failures with the past two games I played, I wanted something that was simple, sweet, and a palate cleanser. I have hundreds if not thousands of games in my backlog, and I just watched the Wholesome Games Direct to put half-a-dozen games onto my Wishlist (and download the demos). I played a few of the demos, and then decided to try out a game I bought after watching last year’s Wholesome Games Direct (at least I think that’s where I saw it). It’s amusing to me that my two genre of games are cozy games and FromSoft games. Well, yes, there are some roguelite/likes, but those are few and farw between.
This game is a dating sim, which is very much not my jam. I’ve played one I really enjoyed (Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator (Game Grumps)) and one I mostly enjoyed (Boyfriend Dungeon (Kitfox Games)), but that’s about it. In this one, though, you are a ghost who is matchmaking residents in a house rather than dating people/entities yourself. The mechanics are simple, and I think you can match anyone with each other (you can’t make a thruple, sadly, though I did try), and I finished one run in 3 hours. There are twelve residents, and you start out with four in your house.
You steal items in the house and either give them to a resident in the name of another resident or sell it online to make money. By the way, the online stuff is hilarious. I think the website where you buy/sell is Eekbay or something like that (it’s actually eep!Bay). Then there’s Deaddit, too, in which a bunch of ghosts talk about what’s happening in the game as if it were real, and another option you can unlock in which you write scam emails for money.
By the way, one thing I appreciate about the game is that in that mini-game (where you write scam emails for money), the way you write it is a bit Mad Libs. There are three blanks, and for each one, you have to choose a word or phrase. Every option is accompanied by a colored shape, and you have to matchh up all three colored shapes. When I first played it, the options were whizzing by at a rate that I had no chance of doing correctly. In options, I could slow it down to an almost-literal crawl, which is what I did.
You can match any resident with any other resident. Meaning, you could do more than one romance at a time. But, I’m assuming that you can’t have more than one relationship with the same person go to five stars.