When writing anything I do wonder about the audience who will read it, the likeness is that it’ll be a handful of friends at most, maybe a few extra “randoms” via searching for specific titles or if I get Bingo by hitting the front page of the site.
If it wasn’t clear from the opening paragraph of reflection a lot of my reviews are almost more like journals, after all the site does have a journal tab that records your progress and it feels like a logical way to look at the process. I’m not writing for a specific audience, I’m writing for me - sure I want people to read my words and I enjoy the interactions and conversations it can create but to imagine yourself as a “writer” here, however good you are is a little too out there from my perspective.

I say this because if I were running a website or magazine I wouldn’t give someone like me (straight, white, male) this game to review because the writing, the subjects it touches on are never going to quite hit as hard.
Sure I can, and will, break down the game by its mechanics and touch on how good I felt the writing was but this game didn’t and could not hit on a level it will for some.
From my perspective, whatever that is worth, Thirsty Suitors is well written and feels mostly quite open, deep and honest about a whole range of different genders, sexualities and cultures.
I say mostly because the occasional character piece did feel cliché, bordering stereotypical to me but I am not in the position to fully judge if they did lean too far or not.

The writing, be it between Jala (the protagonist) and her parents, her internal monologue with her “sister” in her head or in the quite out there pseudo-psychic battles with her exes, is strong.
Characters are funny but also flawed, some more obviously than others but everyone feels real even whilst being presented in a cel-shaded-like style in a semi-cartoonish world.
I cannot deny that some of the writing did straight up make me feel old, but I never once felt as with a lot of media that “kids don’t talk this way”. I say kids, they’re mostly in their twenties.

Plot wise this story shares a lot with Scott Pilgrim, although rather than fighting a new partner's exes it surrounds Jala returning home (90’s Washington US) to face and make-good with her exes as well as her family.
I will not delve deep into each character but Jala is (I assume) a pansexual, cis female, American with an Indian mother and Sri Lankan father. As I said near the start, a much more diverse and interesting spectrum of gender, race and sexuality than myself.
Jala has many more exes than I do and unlike me they’re not all just white women.
This game flies the LGBT+ flag with pride and it’s great, it isn’t just Jala’s exes though, it’s not brushed off as just a thing with “the kids” either which is a nice thing to see.
Unlike Scott, Jala is cool and outwardly confident, she skates, she has style and there are a lot of people lusting after her.

Battles with the exes, suitors and Bear cult children (it’s a whole thing) are fought in turn based style, much like a JRPG.
Jala can use taunts that range from thirsty to heartless that show opponents weaknesses and can create debuffs. It’s an interesting system where you’re discovering what the suitor type is and exploiting it with specific attacks against it while at the same time trying to avoid the same happening to Jala.
The combat is sadly a little basic, it uses Mario RPG like QTE elements to keep the moves engaging but the system barely evolves outside of some summons.
The strength of the system however is not only how it reflects the whole idea of the game, a battle of wits - but also some deep reflections but how it integrates conversations and conversational choices within to further the story and give you a much more colourful impression of the characters in it.
The highlights of these are the boss battles against the exes where their insecurities and the like are visualised as how they see themselves and also with things that may protect them.
One of the more interesting boss fights is against an ex who clearly has an internal conflict about not only showing their sexuality but who they should be culturally - wanting to be progressive but also wanting to carry history with them.
Although some of these visualisations are arguably simplifications, they are easy to understand even for a default player 1 like myself and also to the game’s benefit are exciting to look at.

Outside of RPG battling and some conversational choices, the game has two other elements.
First off is skateboarding, a passion of Jala’s and the way she traverses the main town area.
Sadly it just feels quite bad to do, boards tend to be somewhat magnetic in games and as a fan of Jet Set Radio I am not against it - but here it’s turned up too much.
Jala gets sucked towards things too easily and although can stop very fast just feels like she is bumping into so much if you’re trying anything precise.
You do get used to how it controls but becoming competent with something does not mean it becomes enjoyable. At best some segments feel like a mini-roller coaster in an almost 3D Sonic way, but in this flow the game doesn’t feel skill based and sometimes just gets in the way.
I found myself wishing Jala could just carry the board and run around town, when the skatepark area opens it took me around 15 minutes to get bored of it and when the game announced the skate challenges were completely optional I couldn’t click on skipping them any faster.

It’s a shame because I feel, putting it in basic terms, skating is the second main part of the game and it has a lot of this game’s landscape dedicated to it but… it’s bad.

The other gaming element is cooking, these are mostly optional too and give Jala a chance to pick the brains of her parents. Cooking itself is QTE challenges with some choices in how to use your heat gauge to gain a better score but sadly is a broken system in the “compliment” wheel being the easiest way to get a high score but the thing with the most RNG.
I took part in all the cooking I could, one of my favourite characters in the game was Jala’s father so interacting with him always kept me smiling. Also the side quests for exes you made up with all mostly had you cook for them so you could get ahead of that.

The other benefit to cooking was getting food items for it that were for healing in battle.
Skating challenges would give you attack items and cosmetics but sadly the game falls apart a little here too.
I never set any difficulty down but I never felt the need to use items until some later boss fights and that was to keep my health topped up and nothing more.
Due to most fights being about the conversations and finding weaknesses I never really felt Jala needed the extra hand with tools, the summons you get as the game progresses were more than enough to keep on top of the increasing levels of the opposition.
This meant that not only did I not want to do the skating because it felt bad, there was no real incentive to do so. Really outside of dialogue there wasn’t any incentive to do anything bar follow the critical path.

I say falls apart but specifically “a little” because really this game is much more like a VN under its skin. It has systems and skateboarding but I think the people that will love Thirsty Suitors would love it without these, bare naked and being honest about itself like the story is trying to be.
Don’t get me wrong, the game tries to be more and it doesn’t fail, it just doesn’t succeed in a meaningful manner. Having these mechanics and systems makes it a lot easier to swallow and probably a lot more approachable.

While what Thirsty Suitors does have to show is nice, well presented with decent voice acting, music and a great art direction it can feel a little bare.
The house is essentially one room with a few items to look at. The town has four buildings which are all one room with little in them to interact with and the skatepark side of things is there but nothing new or exciting - and that is it, three areas which while again presented nicely are on one of the most pointless maps in games.

Overall I had a good time with Thirsty Suitors, it never really outstayed its welcome but would have felt much a much tighter experience with the skating completely cut.
The story and characters were great and although I cannot fully relate to it all the game did definitely make me feel for a lot of the characters and enjoy a good few of them being around.
Jala herself was a joy as a protagonist but sadly what she had to do outside of talking wasn’t all that satisfying.

Reviews are not entirely about their scores, but if you look at this as low, know that there are two major factors which I believe could make this a much higher rated game for you personally.
First mechanically you might actually enjoy skateboarding, want to do all the challenges and this will give Thirsty Suitors much more meat on the bone as an experience.
Secondly is if you are LGTQ+ or from a much more interesting background than me because the flavour of this game will be so much more aromatic or even spicy to you.

To end with a cliché, variety is the spice of life.
I believe this is important within people and I think it is important with art too. I’m happy this game exists, I am especially happy that this is on many systems including Game Pass and possibly coming to more because even if you are just a straight white male like me who is probably not putting this on their GOTY list it is really worth listening to what it has to say.

Yes, the skateboarding is floaty and imprecise. But you can mostly just ignore it! Yes, there are a lot of QTEs, but they aren't inherently bad, and you can turn up the difficulty on them if you want! Yes, the turn-based battles are easy, but using them as a physical manifestation of the arguments Jala has with all the people she has wronged in the past is genius! I love the writing so very much, and this is one of the most lovable casts in a video game I can think of. Jala was a horrible person, wracked with guilt and without the emotional maturity to realise it or deal with it in a healthy way. Her trying to make up with everyone (and herself) was a journey I absolutely adored and I cannot recommend it enough to people who love interactive fiction.

I walked into this expecting to really find it annoying, but it was more annoying in a gay way than a diaspora kid way so I felt able to be more lenient towards it. Still, I still find it lacking in having the conversations it needs to have. It’s moulded in the American liberal tradition of diaspora narratives, always ultimately optimistic about the ties that bind us and the motherlands, always finding the right angles where all our identities can be overlaid on top of each other perfectly. Even when this game is critical of the conservatism embedded in much of south asian social relations, it is reductively simplistic - the homophobic parents of one of the side characters are Brahmins who have brought all of their casteism to the new world that they have different plates for non-Brahmin guests! Jala’s, the protagonist’s, parents have historically progressed a generation ahead having eloped in a caste-exogamous marriage which informs how they raised their children. Their homophobia was dealt with in their generation too, with Jala’s aunt’s lesbianism leaving decades of room to have it addressed and sorted out. But this is a cowardly artifice rooted in contemporary anxieties of representation - our families are not violently homophobic satans clinging on to feudal hierarchies or futuristically progressive angels. Our anxieties are a lot more complex. My communist mother and liberal father (don’t say this is a good sitcom setup, I know, I’ve lived it for 22 years, Kerala has a great tradition of comedy of this vein) have always allowed me to do and be whatever and whoever I want, but they are still a pair of 52 year old Indian Gen X-ers. I don’t talk to them about queer issues. I don’t know where to start. I don’t know if their allowance of “what and who I want” extents to being a woman. I wish the game was interested in navigating this complexity instead of black and white depictions of south asian conservatism and progressivism. It reads very much like a “we don’t want to scare off a white liberal audience with a more nuanced engagement with the baggage of history”, and every time the game dips into “haha Asian parents am I right” humour I wanted to destroy the state of california.

On the flipside, and maybe this is what they were going for, Jala is a perfect fantasy. She is absolutely what people like me wish to be. Aside from the whole being a life-ruining mess for everyone part. She’s empowered, confident, supported by everyone, effortlessly cool. It is absolutely good that we have a game with a protagonist like her, as much as I can be critical of what that game is.

There’s a part of this game where Jala is criticised for choosing “the pleasures of the imperial core” over family and tradition. While the character suggesting this serves an antagonistic function, they are still suggested to be making a correct assessment. But Jala is a Tamil Brahmin whose family lives in Bangalore. The imperial core is where she is minoritised and racialised. The “pleasure of the imperial core” she has access to is queer struggle, not burgers and milkshakes. It’s a much easier struggle than what she’d face in the motherland, but it’s not easy, especially with this game’s weird anachronistic 90s setting. It just appeared so strange to me that such an idea would pop up in this game at all, and so evidently shows the game’s frustrating crisis in managing an original, personal story and the monomyth of asian diasporic narratives.