Esse foi uma surpresa maior que o primeiro jogo. Eu achei que seria um full survival onde eu teria que escapar dos cultistas o tempo todo, mas ele foi bem mais tranquilo do que isso (o que é uma pena, eu realmente gostaria que ele fosse mais difícil). Mas fora isso, os personagens são carismáticos, e mesmo que você tenha que praticamente repetir a mesma coisa em três capítulos diferentes, os devs acharam uma forma de fazer com que isso ficasse divertido e diferente da sua própria maneira em cada cap. E a cereja do bolo, poder namorar uma entidade cósmica além da compreensão humana. Jogão!

My friends played this over stream and I thought that maybe I was just being a hater but no, they didn't like it either. It wasn't particularly funny, it wasn't particularly scary, the puzzles were barely puzzles, there were no real choices, and the story didn't really make sense?

I don't want to spoil anything too specific but the way this game handled the ideas of immortality and eldritch beings was sooo inconsistent. The "Truth" ending left everyone speechless in a bad way, it was such a random ass-pull to try to add depth to the game. Honestly it felt unfinished :\

Also, for a game where the entire selling point is "romance a monster" there was strangely little actual interaction with Rhok'Zan (or however her name was spelled). It was kind of hilarious how uninvolved she was in the actual story of the game, she was basically a plot device. She just kind of gives you a ritual, throws in some half-baked flirting, and then curls up in your bedroom and you can't talk to her again until it's time for the next ritual- and at some point in all this you two fall in love.

Also I know I'm gonna sound lame when I say this but it is really weird to me that this game takes place in a made up city called "Sacramen-Cho" and had a faux-Japanese aesthetic for no reason. I'm not saying it had to take place in a generic Americana suburb or whatever but it felt like the devs just thought surface level anime aesthetics were kawaii~ even though the game kinda didn't even really have all that much to do with anime or visual novel/dating sim tropes.

Sucker for Love was an interesting concept buried beneath repetition and an overly saccharine story rammed with anime cliches. Date to Die For is an improvement on a lot of levels, but inherits many of the same core issues, chiefly, it's still weeb shit.

Let me qualify that statement: I like anime. Well, some anime. Like any other medium, it has its standout examples as well as its bad tropes. The same goes for visual novels, a lot of them are brilliant and a lot of them suck donkeys. The problem with a lot of indie, heavily anime-inspired VNs is that they're too focussed on delivering an experience that feels like their inspirations to find a truly original and interesting angle. Games like 2064, Murder By Numbers and Hatoful Boyfriend sand off their edges to such an extreme that they become incomparable to the greats that they were aping in the first place.

Hatoful Boyfriend might be the most apt comparison to Sucker For Love, given that it is also lampooning dating sims specifically. It also had a great, or at least very funny concept and starts out strong, but soon gives in to overly sentimental fluff and incomprehensible twists. Don't get me wrong, I generally liked both Hatoful Boyfriend and SfL, but I eventually found that they both grew fairly tedious and eye-rolly. Date to Die For shares a lot of these same issues, but does improve on them in a few key areas.

First, the gameplay is a lot better. Being able to freely explore a full house rather than a one-bedroom flat feels liberating and enables much more creative horror sequences. The visuals are better too, in fact the presentation all round is great. Stardust, your protagonist, is much better than the last game's PC, if only because she's far less singularly obsessed with the idea of seducing the Elder God, but that can leave her motivation muddled at times. Still, a boring character is usually better than a slightly creepy one, so definitely deserving of the "most improvement" award there. And overall, I found this game a fair bit creepier than its predecessor, but it still wasn't exactly scary.

All of that is to say though that I just wish Date to Die For was more gratuitous. Normally shock-value and fanservice are black marks against a game, but here their absence is missed. For a game seemingly about trying to kiss a giant breasted goat Mommy, it's shockingly tame, with barely a swear word in sight and no nudity to speak of. The game almost seems to resent having to depict any violence or gore too, so while many of its creature and character designs are great, it just doesn't utilise them well enough.

It's just that when you're going into a game about doing horrible rituals for an Eldritch God with huge boobs so you can kiss them, you expect something pretty full-on. I don't want the game to be porn, god there's plenty of hentai on steam now, we hardly need any more. But I did want it to utilise the potential juiciness of its concept more, rather than deliver something as tame as this. The new spray bottle mechanic is a fantastic example, this allows you to spritz a character any time they start to get flirty, usually to chuckle-worthy effect, but this only comes up a handful of times. At the end of the day, Sucker for Love is too afraid to take big risks, leaving you with a generally charming if slightly dull experience. It's better than the first game, or at least more fun, but there's so much unused potential here.