The thing about absurdism is that it's... well, absurdly hard to do right. Too silly? You stumble into farce. Try and use it as a lens for satire, commentary, critique? You risk your work becoming hamfisted, overbearing. Striking that balance, especially for a broad audience, is no easy feat.

So it's not lightly that I say that Sucker for Love caught me off guard. Engaging mechanical structure, the perfect balance of the ridiculous versus the oddly human and sincere, a finale that successfully cashes in on the check the premise wrote. Charming art, excellent VA, just enough length and just enough secrets.

A genuine surprise. No notes.

To reiterate from when I first reviewed this: I’m no fan of ‘parody’ visual novels — and how they tend to gobble up media attention from brethren that are aiming for something beyond ‘haha, it’s meant to be bad!’ cynicism — but this sticks the landing. For a couple of reasons: even beyond the fairly solid production values, even beyond how regardless of the ‘dating sim the Old Gods!’ veneer it's a fairly solid adaptation of the mythos and characters it's drawing off, what it does best is how beyond the visual novel elements it plays more like an adventure game than anything else. A pretty solid one, too. Rather than making choices or picking dialogue, progress is gated primarily by the things you do in gameplay: mixing and matching all the different things in your apartment to perform all the different rituals, as well as taking in context clues to figure out the order of operations for certain endings. It’s fun to play, a… not terrible lead-in to cosmic horror for those unacquainted with it (and having some cute references for anyone who does have that innate familiarity)... but maybe, perhaps, doesn’t feel as polished as it could be. The UI tends to get in its own way: accidentally grabbing items when you meant to move the screen around, closing the ritual book when you're trying to speak an incantation. There are… enough typos for me to notice it as a consistent problem, to the point where this really would have benefitted from an edit pass. I like the final section a good bit — how genuinely stressful it manages to feel for a game that’s been pretty light on difficulty beforehand — but it goes on for way too long and sends you all the way back for failure, not helped by how finicky it feels to drag your mouse across the screen and speak out spells. It doesn’t dilute too hard from the core of the gameplay, and it manages to theme itself around its cosmic horror influences in a way that thankfully doesn’t feel like it’s just going ‘haha… what if there was a dating sim where you kissed Cthulhu???’, I just think maybe that there are certain things here that stop it from being great rather than good, and that a bit more time spent on certain aspects of the game could’ve done a lot to bridge that particular gap.

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

H.P. Lovecraft once said that fear of the unknown is the strongest fear of mankind, but what if you want to grab that unknown by the shoulders and plant a wet, sloppy smooch all over it's face? Well, this game basically tells you what happens. The game is literally what you would expect from it. You do dark rituals to summon eldritch horrors, you date them and try to win their smooches all for yourself.

The writing in Sucker for Love is charming and funny throughout, but you still feel the pangs of fear once things start to go sideways. I think this is due to the time pressure from few of the scenes plus the more intense time pressure of the secret route, which is something you don't see in VNs that often. The gameplay involves talking to and performing rituals for your lovely lady horrors. The theme for these rituals change for each girl, as such it keeps the main mechanics of the game fresh even though you're still doing pretty much the same things.

If you look past the thirsty meme reviews talking about how they want to bang that Cthussy and leave your expectations of cringe behind you, this game will un-ironically be amazing. The game parodies on dating sim games, human nature and Lovecraftian elements while also somehow doing all of them justice very well. The humour is also very funny and had me laughing out loud multiple times.

And with the words of the protagonist: "3D women are fine, but fourth dimensional girls with non-euclidean geometry are smokin' hot! They've got curves I can literally get lost in." I leave you with this question: Are you ready to smooch those Lovecraftian Horrors? The answer is yes. obviously.

and Aunty Nyan Nyan can step on me any day.