The Love – Date Simulator with Girls

Genre: Simulation / Misc.

Players: 1

Game Company Bad Behavior Profile Page: Midnight Works

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Review:

The Love, released on Nintendo Switch in 2023, is a game that aims to simulate the experience of using a dating app like Tinder or Bumble, allowing players to play out what it would be like to have a conversation with numerous attractive potential partners. Despite what this game’s title states, it’s not just girls you can pursue – players can take the role of a male or female, and can choose to pursue male or female partners regardless of their own gender choice (sorry nonbinary, trans, and bi folks, this game doesn’t seem to include you).

If there’s one area where The Love seems to get things right, it’s in the presentation, which does indeed include numerous photos of attractive men and women, though I can’t help but feel like these are stock photos. Also, don’t expect any nudity or even anything mildly risqué like what’s seen in the game’s promotional art – everything I’ve seen within the game itself is pretty tame.

Unfortunately, now I need to talk about the gameplay, and there’s all sorts of issues here.

First, this game starts by having players select multiple interests, just like on a dating app. This appears to do absolutely nothing – the game doesn’t “match” you with characters that share those interests.

Second, when swiping left and right on prospective partners, you cannot look at their profiles to learn about them. All you can see is their name and a single photo.

Third, the game doesn’t have any sort of pretense of realism in its matching system – every single person I “swiped right” on was an immediate match. That’s more than just fantasy wish fulfillment, that’s just plain not believable by any stretch of the imagination.

Fourth, the conversations you have with these people do not seem at all realistic, and I’m not just saying that because women aren’t harassed and men aren’t ignored in this game. One person I “spoke” with immediately started trading jokes with my character’s canned responses without any sort of introduction, and another agreed to meet within just a few exchanges of words.

Fifth, not only are the conversations not realistic, they’re sometimes not even consistent. One conversation gave me the option to comment on how the person I was “speaking” with mentioned loving pets in their profile… despite nothing of the sort appearing in their profile.

Sixth, the “people” the game matches you with don’t have any sort of personality. Rather, they have interests, and your “conversations” revolve around those interests rather than giving you the sense that there’s any more than a one-dimensional caricature on the other side of the chat.

Seventh, you are extremely limited in your interactions. You are very rarely given opportunities to direct the conversation in different ways, but these choices rarely seem especially meaningful.

Eighth, there don’t ever appear to be negative consequences for anything you do. There are no stakes here, no wrong choices, nothing you need to work on or build. Nothing you do here has any meaning.

The Love is one of those games where I just don’t know who this game is for. It’s not sexy enough for the titillation it hints at, it doesn’t provide anything remotely resembling a realistic simulation, there’s no meaningful gameplay choices, the writing is uninteresting, the characters one-dimensional. All that’s left when you remove everything this game could have done better is a pathetic exercise in self-delusion, and not a convincing one, at that.

tl;dr – The Love is an odd sort of Simulation-style game that aims to replicate the feeling of using a dating app, but it’s poorly-designed, poorly-written, offers little in the way of meaningful choice, and even the arousing content the game implies you’ll find is not to be found here. In short, there is absolutely no reason to play this game.

Grade: F

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This game has been nominated for one or more of eShopperReviews 2023 Game Awards:

Runner-Up: Worst Game, The “Who asked for this!?” Award

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