Listen up, friends. Here are my top tips for making sure a date goes well: show interest; make eye contact; laugh at their jokes; under no circumstances give voice to your inner burning desire to escape, to flee, to gnaw off your own leg and break out of the bear trap of your life; wear something nice.
All of which, all of which, applies to the dream girl you'll take out on the town in PockeDate! – Pocket Dating Simulator, a new, free game from Ternox, the same dev behind Stonks-9800, my personal GOTY of 2023. PockeDate pitches itself as a digital sweetheart in the Steam description—an "adorable girl who forgives all your awkwardness" whose "every launch brings a new date with unique dialogues! Spend endless hours with your adorable, love-struck virtual girlfriend".
Obviously, I was in there like a shot. Or, uh, I mean I curiously, reluctantly fired it up. For a laugh.
The only girl I've ever loved
At first, PockeDate does what it says on the tin. In a beepy, pixel-art style with the hypnotically catchy soundtrack I'd expect from the dev who made Stonks, every new date sees you take your e-paramour, Akari, to a new local hotspot. The beach, the mall, an arcade, a shrine: she loves it all and she's easy to please. All you have to do to achieve a coveted "perfect" date rating is not choose any of the glaringly obvious terrible dialogue options.
It's BioWare-style romance. Build that love meter high enough and she'll invite you over. No, it's not that kind of game. We're in the realm of tasteful fades to black. At least on your first playthrough.
Which all sounds quite awful, right? Like a loneliness-generation engine. Don't worry, PockeDate's not actually what it pretends to be. It takes a leaf out of Doki Doki Literature Club's book, slowly revealing new and darker layers as you spend time with the game. Things start to come apart at the seams. Akari starts to repeat herself and to realise she is repeating herself. Responses from your character—not you—begin to creep in at random moments, revealing a deep well of bitterness, fear and frustration, and an awareness of being trapped in an endless cycle.
It's all done quite well. I'll be honest, I knew going in that PockeDate had some secret second story going on, that things wouldn't be what they appeared, and I didn't expect too much. The cute girl would become scary, it would all be very Ringu, everyone would go home getting exactly what they anticipated. There's an element of that, sure, but from what I've seen PockeDate leans surprisingly hard on the psychological torment that would come from being trapped in a sugary dating sim for eternity—doomed to whisper sweet nothings to a robotic lover until, well, until nothing. It just keeps happening.
It’s a claustrophobic brand of horror, which is maybe appropriate. Perhaps anyone who's ever found themselves stuck in a pseudo-romance they didn't quite want will empathise with the game's cursed protagonist. All I know is that I have to buy Akari something matcha-flavoured, or else she gets upset.
