The developers making Supreme Courtship always had a tricky needle to thread. To educate players about American government they would let them date Supreme Court Justices. It was meant to be upbeat and a little silly. It’s become a thornier project over the last several weeks thanks to Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination,…

Love Island is a British reality TV show in which several glistening, muscular men with sleeve tattoos and unaddressed anger issues are sent to a sunny island villa along with several glossy-haired, incredibly basic women who I’m pretty sure have their perma-bikinis sewn onto their skin, and are then expected to…

From the second I laid my eyes on Pub Encounter in the Nintendo Switch eShop, I knew we were destined for each other.

Sometimes I wonder if writing about sex games has ruined me. It’s certainly ruined my experience of Steam, given that my home page recommendations are now made up of roughly 50 percent visual novels that are really just two-hour-long excuses to look at anime boobs.

I never realized that breaking up could be fun until I played Heartbreak High.

What I was expecting from Angels With Scaly Wings was something like Persona 4, but with fewer confusing dungeon crawls and a lot more dragons making out. What I got was Phoenix Wright, but with even less sexual tension.

Appeeling Personality is a dating sim where you can date bananas. It’s a lot like swiping through bad profiles on Tinder, except you eat all the creeps and losers.

In the opening to the 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen wrote, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” In the new 2018 video game Austen Translation, you play as a woman who’ll do anything to win over that kind of single man.…

In most dating sims, it’s obvious how to romance your crush. You just talk to them over and over, selecting the nicest dialogue responses until your persistence is rewarded. Monster Prom flips that script by introducing both character stats and a competitive multiplayer component.

Doodle Date, a game that has been out on Steam for a week, and can be bought for the low, low price of two dollars, is not at all what I expected. I expected a dating sim with more player input than usual. What I got was a surreal journey of attempted murder, identity crisis, and divorce.

Kindness Coins is a dating sim, released on itch.io in 2013, that asks the question: What is it like to be on the receiving end of the protagonist’s flirting in a dating game?

I have often wondered what the future of VR socialization is. Is it a tool for single-player gratification and fantasy, or for multiplayer friendship-building? Maybe it’s too soon to answer that question, but last week, I played VR Kanojo, and it gave me a good idea of what’s happening in VR now.

Otome games like Mystic Messenger and Tokimeki Memorial Girl’s Side are made specifically for women. The genre began with with Koei’s 1994 game Angelique. Nowadays, otome games are mostly visual novels with lots of reading, but the genre started with a dialogue-light management sim. When I sat down with Tim Rogers to…

Purrfect Date is a cat dating sim, but it’s not like that. There’s a little romance, sure, but there’s also drama, mystery and a fair bit of humor, twisted together in a cleverly-unfolding tail. Tale. Sorry.

Every time I open Instagram, I see three kinds of ads: hipster makeup, hipster clothes and corny-looking visual novels. It’s easy for me to resist the makeup and clothes, as I’m trying to downsize on both right now, but in a moment of weakness, I downloaded one of the visual novels last night. It is terrible. It oozes…

The somewhat janky dating sim Super Star is already pretty out there, and then you get to the hilarious celebrity cameos.

JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure is one of the most influential mangas of all time. References to it show up in dozens of anime, and Hirohiko Araki, the manga’s author, has even shown his work in the Louvre. Despite all these accolades, you’ve never been able to kiss any of the characters, until now.

Have you ever watched Jaws, saw the shark, and thought it was kinda hot? Well you’re in luck, because now you can live out your aquatic apex predator lovin’ dreams in Shark Dating Simulator XL. Be warned— it is definitely NSFW.

In most dating sims, you can rest assured that if you pour time and effort into winning a character’s affections, you’ll have the option of ending up with them. In dad-tastic dating sim Dream Daddy, however, that’s not always the case—a fact that’s made some players upset. I recently spoke with creators Leighton Gray…