Reviews
[Review] Cosmic Horror Courtship Goes Awry in Eldritch Terror Dating Sim ‘Sucker For Love: First Date’
I’d imagine the world of dating is more terrifying than ever before in the past two years. All that time cut off from the wider physical world contorts the social experience into a kind of lucky dip. One where you’re less likely to find a diamond, and far far more likely to come away with a maggoty bag of food waste.
You could totally understand people resorting to more extreme measures to get a little smooch or two. I wonder how many would do what the protagonist of Akabaka’s Sucker For Love: First Date does? He decides to summon a cosmic entity that could destroy him with little more than a cursory glance in his direction, but he’s into that. What’s the end of reality itself when true love could be just a few dark rituals away?
This visual novel dating sim sets out to put the ‘cute’ in Cthulhu (don’t question it, it’s in there) by having our obsessed hunky boy literally risk it all to get a little tentacle action. The result is an endearing mixture of romantic farce and grisly cosmic horror.
Having seen a vision of a cosmic entity, the protagonist attempts to hunt down a copy of the Necronomicon in order to find the correct rituals to summon it. Unfortunately, he’s been conned by internet sellers a few too many times, and when he receives a bright pink ‘Necronomicon’ after forking out an obscene amount of money for it, he’s initially very downhearted. Upon closer inspection, the book turns out to have some merit, containing a variety of rituals, one of which he tries out. The result of that is he summons a shapely eldritch terror known as Ln’ eta. She promises to go on a ‘date’ with him, but if the date goes bad, both his sanity and our reality will be shattered.
This is the first of three ‘dates’ the player can go on (Estir and Nyan being the other potential beastly beaus). The crux of all of them is to perform certain rituals found within ancient tomes exactly as instructed. Failure to do so sees disastrous consequences. The first date eases the player into the flow of things, whilst furthering the romantic story being told. That being of one man and his terrifying eldritch love interest. The rituals usually involve doing some things in the current locale. So for instance, you might need to keep out all light, so you draw the curtains and flick off the lights. Next, you may have to wear certain items or gather the correct offering. Once you’ve ticked off all the criteria, you ‘chant’ the relevant phrase by holding down the left mouse button. then drag the cursor across the text in the book.
Happily, Sucker For Love doesn’t hold you by the hand when it comes to performing these rituals. Little guidance is given beyond the words written in the tomes. The key is to pay attention to exactly what they say and ensure you don’t have a memory lapse that ends up with your mind becoming scrambled eggs. There’s not really a major challenge in these rituals, but they do enough to keep players on their toes. It occasionally throws in the odd timed instance to do so. For instance, several incantations must be performed in quick succession to escape certain doom.
What these rituals do best of all is flavor the dates with something genuinely fresh. Sure, there are other visual novels with twee anime aesthetics that take a dark turn out there. Here, the juxtaposition between goofy dating sim farce and the unfathomable terrors of trying to get close to world-ending creatures is such an exquisitely absurd thing. Something that puts its own unique stamp on the visual novel genre. That is quite the feat considering the wealth of them out there. This is mainly down to the fact it knows what it’s doing with this frothy doom concoction.
Sucker For Love is unafraid to get freaky and weird with its horror element. Better yet, it knows exactly how to pepper that with comedy that focuses on the absurdity of dating eldritch beings with no thought for the wider impact the act causes. The idea that the protagonist is so destructively horny for squid-faced sexytime would be funny enough, but the reality is he only wants to kiss them, and that’s frankly hilarious given the massive gulf that exists between risk and reward.
Amplifying the usual dating sim awkward obstacles like saying something stupid or making a bad choice on a date by adding body horror and doomsday scenarios is another reason Sucker For Love’s dark humor is something of a winner the majority of the time (yes, there’s the odd fumbled joke or reference).
It’s not a particularly lengthy experience, but Sucker For Love probably doesn’t need all that much more to it. As it is, it’s a punchy, fun, and occassionally grim, dating sim that prefers to steer clear of the darker, dirtier lanes of cosmic horror and the raunchier, saucier side of dating sims. Yet mixes up just enough of both to make for an enjoyable treat for horror fans with a sense of humor.
Sucker For Love review code for PC provided by the publisher.
Sucker For Love: First Date is out now for PC on Steam.
Reviews
“AHS: Delicate” Review – “Little Gold Man” Mixes Oscar Fever & Baby Fever into the Perfect Product
‘AHS: Delicate’ enters early labor with a fun, frenzied episode that finds the perfect tone and goes for broke as its water breaks.
“I’ll figure it out. Women always do.”
American Horror Story is no stranger to remixing real-life history with ludicrous, heightened Murphy-isms, whether it’s AHS: 1984’s incorporation of Richard Ramirez, AHS: Cult’s use of Valerie Solanas, or AHS: Coven’s prominent role for the Axeman of New Orleans. Accordingly, it’s very much par for the course for AHS: Delicate to riff on other pop culture touchstones and infinitely warp them to its wicked whims. That being said, it takes real guts to do a postmodern feminist version of Rosemary’s Baby and then actually put Mia Farrow – while she’s filming Rosemary’s Baby, no less – into the narrative. This is the type of gonzo bullshit that I want out of American Horror Story! Sharon Tate even shows up for a minute because why the hell not? Make no mistake, this is completely absurd, but the right kind of campy absurdity that’s consistently been in American Horror Story’s wheelhouse since its inception. It’s a wild introduction that sets up an Oscar-centric AHS: Delicate episode for success. “Little Gold Man” is a chaotic episode that’s worth its weight in gold and starts to bring this contentious season home.
It’d be one thing if “Little Gold Man” just featured a brief detour to 1967 so that this season of pregnancy horror could cross off Rosemary’s Baby from its checklist. AHS: Delicate gets more ambitious with its revisionist history and goes so far as to say that Mia Farrow and Anna Victoria Alcott are similarly plagued. “Little Gold Man” intentionally gives Frank Sinatra dialogue that’s basically verbatim from Dex Harding Sr., which indicates that this demonic curse has been ruffling Hollywood’s feathers for the better part of a century. Anna Victoria Alcott’s Oscar-nominated feature film, The Auteur, is evidently no different than Rosemary’s Baby. It’s merely Satanic forces’ latest attempt to cultivate the “perfect product.” “Little Gold Man” even implies that the only reason that Mia Farrow didn’t go on to make waves at the 1969 Academy Awards and ends up with her twisted lot in life is because she couldn’t properly commit to Siobhan’s scheme, unlike Anna.
This is easily one of American Horror Story’s more ridiculous cold opens, but there’s a lot of love for the horror genre and Hollywood that pumps through its veins. If Hollywood needs to be a part of AHS: Delicate’s story then this is actually the perfect connective tissue. On that note, Claire DeJean plays Sharon Tate in “Little Gold Man” and does fine work with the brief scene. However, it would have been a nice, subtle nod of continuity if AHS: Delicate brought back Rachel Roberts who previously portrayed Tate in AHS: Cult. “Little Gold Man” still makes its point and to echo a famous line from Jennifer Lynch’s father’s television masterpiece: “It is happening again.”
“Little Gold Man” is rich in sequences where Anna just rides the waves of success and enjoys her blossoming fame. She feels empowered and begins to finally take control of her life, rather than let it push her around and get under her skin like a gestating fetus. Anna’s success coincides with a colossal exposition dump from Tavi Gevinson’s Cora, a character who’s been absent for so long that we were all seemingly meant to forget that she was ever someone who was supposed to be significant. Cora has apparently been the one pulling many of Anna’s strings all along as she goes Single White Female, rather than Anna having a case of Repulsion. It’s an explanation that oddly works and feeds into the episode’s more general message of dreams becoming nightmares. Cora continuing to stay aligned with Dr. Hill because she has student loans is also somehow, tragically the perfect explanation for her abhorrent behavior. It’s not the most outlandish series of events in an episode that also briefly gives Anna alligator legs and makes Emma Roberts and Kim Kardashian kiss.
“Little Gold Man” often feels like it hits the fast-forward button as it delivers more answers, much in the same vein as last week’s “Ava Hestia.” These episodes are two sides of the same coin and it’s surely no coincidence that they’re both directed by Jennifer Lynch. This season has benefitted from being entirely written by Halley Feiffer – a first for the series – but it’s unfortunate that Lynch couldn’t direct every episode of AHS: Delicate instead of just four out of nine entries. That’s not to say that a version of this season that was unilaterally directed by Lynch would have been without its issues. However, it’s likely that there’d be a better sense of synergy across the season with fewer redundancies. She’s responsible for the best episodes of AHS: Delicate and it’s a disappointment that she won’t be the one who closes the season out in next week’s finale.
To this point, “Little Gold Man” utilizes immaculate pacing that helps this episode breeze by. Anna’s Oscar nomination and the awards ceremony are in the same episode, whereas it feels like “Part 1” of the season would have spaced these events out over four or five episodes. This frenzied tempo works in “Little Gold Man’s” favor as AHS: Delicate speed-runs to its finish instead of getting lost in laborious plotting and unnecessary storytelling. This is how the entire season should have been. Although it’s also worth pointing out that this is by far the shortest episode of American Horror Story to date at only 34 minutes. It’s a shame that the season’s strongest entries have also been the ones with the least amount of content. There could have been a whole other act to “Little Gold Man,” or at the least, a substantially longer cold open that got more out of its Mia Farrow mayhem.
“Little Gold Man” is an American Horror Story episode that does everything right, but is still forced to contend with three-quarters of a subpar season. “Part 2” of AHS: Delicate actually helps the season’s first five episodes shine brighter in retrospect and this will definitely be a season that benefits from one long binge that doesn’t have a six-month break in the middle. Unfortunately, anyone who’s already watched it once will likely not feel compelled to experience these labor pains a second time over. With one episode to go and Anna’s potential demon offspring ready to greet the world, AHS: Delicate is poised to deliver one hell of a finale.
Although, to paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “How do you expect to be a good conclusion if this is what you’re chasing?”
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