Hatoful Boyfriend is a game I remember talking about with a fellow co-worker over the summer. I couldn’t remember the name of the game until we played it in class but the second we started streaming, it all came back to me. My friend was THRILLED about this game and was fully invested emotionally. This game is both humorous and weird and the thought of playing a bird dating simulator is definitely not a common one. Part of me wants to know how someone came up with the decision to create a bird dating simulator game. Dating human characters in a game is one thing but birds?

Hatoful Boyfriend is one of the reasons why I think that dating sims are one of the most versatile game genres out there. Dating sims leave the door wide open for game developers to be able to step out of their comfort zone and create something that has never really been done before. We saw that with Dream Daddy where you go around dating different Dads. Dating sims are also a simple way to create a game that isn’t too complex but represent a group of people that might usually not be represented very often in games. There’s a dating sim called Katawa Shoujo, where you find true love with one of the several girl characters in the game. What makes this game unique though is the fact that every character has some sort of disability. People with disabilities are a group that is not often represented in video games so being able to create a game that does so is amazing. With just a simple search on the web, you can see the multitude of dating sims available to us. Jurassic Heart involves a T-rex, there’s even an alpaca and printer(yes a printer) dating sim game out there.

There seems to be no limit when it comes to dating sims. If someone has made a dating sim about a printer, I am sure it can get even weirder from there. There’s no saying what dating sim developers will release next. I’m tempted to delve into the black hole that is the dating sim world and really see for myself how much weirder these games can get.