[Review] Sucker for Love: Date to Die For

Lovecraftian influences, a voluptuous goat woman, and genuine horror; all steeped in the aesthetics of 90’s era anime. Sucker for Love: Date to Die For tells a surprisingly touching narrative, despite its comedic and outlandish premise.

Although the game is working as a satire of dating sims, I’m hesitant to label it one because there’s only one character available for romance, Rhok’zan, The All-Mother, Black Sheep of the Woods and an Outer God of lust and fertility.

You are Stardust, a girl returning to her hometown of Sacramen’Cho, to find it overtaken by an eldritch cult who have hijacked Rhok’zan’s powers for their own ends. Due to her asexuality, Stardust finds herself immune to the aura of lust that permeates her hometown and drives its inhabitants mad, making her the perfect foil to Rhok’Zan’s overt sexuality.

The queer representation doesn’t feel shoe-horned into the game. The writing doesn’t make a spectacle of Stardust’s identity, with her asexuality mentioned when appropriate, and it isn’t a pillar around which her whole character is based. It is deftly handled, and at no point did I feel like it was an example of shallow forced inclusivity. Stardust is just who she is, outside of the wider narrative.

Overall, the dialogue was enjoyable, and besides Stardust, all characters are fully voice acted. While the game is filled with mostly well delivered performances, there were a few lines where the dialogue became cringe-worthy. The worst offender was the teenage girl cliché, written in a mess of valley girl dialogue, spouting ‘yeah’, ‘like’, and ‘whatever’ in every other line. The constant stream quickly pulled me out of what would have otherwise been a grounded experience. The remaining members of the supporting cast are also cut from a fairly standard range of tropes, but they still retain enough depth and inherent humanity to keep them engaging during their limited screen-time.

While not a direct sequel to 2022’s Sucker for Love, there’s some fleshing out of shared eldritch cosmos and a few cameos from previous characters, but for the most part it’s a self-contained story. Like the previous title, Date to Die For combines the narrative focus of visual novels with elements borrowed from point-and-click adventure games. Traversing its environment takes the form of moving from one static image to the next, clicking to interact with objects and examine details.

Performing eldritch rituals is the main way the story progresses, with each one serving as a milestone in Stardust’s mission to banish Rhok’zan, saving her hometown and releasing the eldritch being from the cults machinations. These are simple to achieve, involving lighting candles of a specific color, facing a specific object in a room, or collecting a few components. Obtaining these require traversing through Stardust’s childhood home, often whilst avoiding the dangers that stalk the halls.

Her home is of a traditional Japanese style, coming to sliding doors and passing from room to room involves approaching and physically moving the mouse to literally slide them open. This causes you to slowly open each set of doors, peek through, and look to see if the room beyond is safe. Sneaking around dangers that could be in any room can make for some genuinely tense gameplay. The only major downside is that during quieter moments it can become a tad frustrating having to manually open each and every set of doors.

While the game is of a shorter nature, the story still manages to feel nuanced, developing enough over my time with it to fill out the overall playtime, while not outstaying its welcome. Despite having a minimal number of characters to interact with and a world that focuses on a smaller number of environments, the experience manages to avoid going stale, which would be the risk if it were to run for much longer.

As you take part in completing rituals and steadily make progress, you unlock checkpoints.

These checkpoints reveal information that makes it easy to see the range of different routes the game has available to you. This is an innovative choice that makes it much easier to view the alternative choices than I’ve seen in most visual novels, which typically require multiple playthroughs to see all of their content, but the game lacks enough meaningful choices to make use of this system. While most chapters tended to have a couple of different endings, most deviations within a chapter usually just resulted in a premature death, meaning that you can see most of the content on offer over a single playthrough.

Whenever a decision point is presented, be it via branching dialogue or a choice in how to proceed, it’s relatively easy to identify which is the right option. ‘Be a good person’ seems to be the general through-line for every decision, in order to see the game through to its end. That being said, lacking meaningful choices didn’t hold me back from enjoying my time in Sacramen’Cho.

The development of Stardust and Rhok’zans’s relationship is the real star of the show. Over the course of the game, a bond grows between the two, alongside the wider plot, and skillfully demonstrates how a romance outside of the sexualized and physical variety can be just as compelling as any other.

It’s a refreshing approach in a genre that can often revolve around the same boring set of mechanical and narrative tropes, too easily devolving into trying to hit the next clichéd romantic milestone. As a tightly focused dating sim with its eyes set on telling the story of only one suitor, both the romance and the multitude of other-worldly influences are all the more compelling. Gruesome acts are spliced between conversations with Rhok’zan, and in a lesser narrative these would easily be at loggerheads with each other, yet here neither disparate thread feels like a lesser subplot, or like they’re getting in each other’s way.

Borrowing the typical melodious piano common to visual novels, the game injects its soundtrack with something more dancey, perfectly complementing the visual style. Vibrant and happy, the title track acts as a perfect compliment to the game’s happier moments, and serves as a stark contrast to moments of dark horror. In these points of tension, the music would fade, and I would instead be left with silence, only broken up by the ambient sound of creaking wood or footsteps in a nearby room. This tonal whiplash helped augment the moments when creeping through rooms was genuinely stressful.

The ability to ‘disable’ jump scares is one of several features that allow players to customize the experience to their desires. While in this mode, jump scares do still occur, but text warnings pop up to give you at least a little time to prepare yourself. There’s also a mechanic revolving around a plant mister, which is an item that is required for the game’s initial ritual. After this point, you are able to use the plant mister in several context specific moments, usually to douse Rhok’Zan when she is being particularly forward with her advances. This allows you to skip those sections of dialogue, if you find them a little too hot and heavy. It’s a small detail, but the blending of user choice with mechanics was a unique approach that I haven’t often seen.

While there are some striking visuals and stellar art direction on display in the game, there’s also an element of inconsistency in the character designs. Some, like Billie and antagonist Buck, could have stepped right out of a 90’s anime, as they’re drawn in a simple style that recreates the hand-colored artwork of the era. In contrast, certain images of Stardust and Rhok’zhan have a vibrant color-palette which lends a much more contemporary feel to their design, and it speaks to how cohesive the rest of the art direction is that such small discrepancies are brought into focus.

Unfortunately, this sense of style is not as strong or consistent in the form of the backgrounds.  While they do just about manage to pull off the job of conveying the world, I saw nothing that really pulled me in and made me want to stop to admire the view. In a genre that can have some truly gorgeous artwork, there just isn’t the spectacle I’d expect.

Sucker for Love: a Date to Die For is, at its heart, a short and earnest tale about two people who, while slammed together by the most unique of conflicts, learn to find solace in each other. It’s a game with a deep core of humanity, on which satire and cosmic horror can hang. Wearing its heart on its sleeve, it tells a narrative that is way more compelling than it has any right to be.