In addition to our main Game of the Year Awards 2023, each member of the PC Gamer team is shining a spotlight on a game they loved this year. We'll post new personal picks, alongside our main awards, throughout the rest of the month.
Everybody knows you have to go back to your hometown to find yourself—as well as to deal with all your estranged relationships and family issues. Which is why I absolutely refuse to do so in real life, and instead play videogames about it like Night in the Woods, Life is Strange, and Thirsty Suitors.
In Thirsty Suitors, Jala returns home to crash with her parents following a bad break-up. The problem with going there to escape her relationship problems is that the town she grew up in is a great big box she spent her youth filling with exes, who all have unresolved feelings they want to confront her about. These play out as stylized JRPG-esque battles, of course. Thirsty Suitors is basically South Asian Scott Pilgrim.
The confrontations become turn-based menu combat, combined with quicktime events when you choose special moves. Nailing one of these either boosts your damage or defence. It's like Super Mario RPG or Costume Quest, only with hyper-stylized versions of adults arguing about why they broke up. The status effects you can apply with taunts include Rage and Thirst, and many of the battles can become either a trade of insults or flirtation at your choice. Whichever you choose becomes exaggerated into anime combat where verbally dunking on someone becomes a slam-dunk attack complete with a glowing basketball you hurl at their head.
It's not all turn-based psychosexual conflict. Between battles you explore the town, and where Night in the Woods had its platform parkour, Thirsty Suitors has skateboarding. It's a bit rough around the edges, but then so is Jet Set Radio and everyone forgives that because it's stylish. Well, so is Thirsty Suitors. Thankfully the skate challenges are optional and you can just use your board as a quick way of getting around if you're not into chaining combos.
The other big minigame in Thirsty Suitors is a cooking one, which you engage in with your Indian mother. She's a literal Cooking Mama you have to impress with your adult ability to prepare dishes like parathas and dal makhani. Perfecting the quicktime events for each step gives you heat points, which you either invest into making the process more flashy and the minigame more challenging, or risk on complements with random effects. Either might earn your mother's approval, but like everything else it plays out with metaphorical visuals like a spinning wheel that represents the unpredictability of her responses to your attempts at being nice.
While the writing's funny, a big part of the joy of Thirsty Suitors is the animation. Jala never walks down stairs when she could cartwheel, and spins around the kitchen like she's in The Matrix. Even washing her hands is a balletic performance. After years of seeing videogame characters interact with clothes off-screen, the ease with which she shrugs in and out of her jacket and other clothes, often while cartwheeling, is a treat. It's the animators showing off as much as Jala. It's absolutely unnecessary, but it put a smile on my face, just like every other part of Thirsty Suitors.
