Boyfriend Dungeon Review (QED)
Boyfriend Dungeon was, believe it or not, my most anticipated game of 2021. Moon Hunters, this studio's previous game, is one of my favorite games of all time, and it does so many unique things that I have still not seen recreated elsewhere, I was sure with such a juicy premise this game would surely turn into something worth playing.
It didn't.
Flatly put, this game is unfinished. It barely has enough content to qualify as a proof of concept, and corners are so cut in almost every area that it makes me feel like the studio did not appropriate their budget properly and suffered the backlash of having a successful kickstarter in terms of heightened expectations. The premise 'date your weapons' is great, but this game barely manages to deliver on that premise in the most basic way, and in some ways it's even offensively regressive from a mechanical standpoint.
Firstly, the weapon movesets are not complex; there is a light attack, a heavy attack, and sometimes a combination between the two, and that's it. There is a roll, but no stamina system, meaning everything is based on invisible micro-cooldowns. This is fine in practice for, say, maybe, a mini-game, or an action RPG made 20 years ago, but it's not fine for a modern *anything* to be this basic and monotonous in its combat in my opinion. This is exacerbated by the fact that the enemy designs in this game are non-existent; literal, real life objects like phones, staplers, and pencils form the entirety of the enemy cast. That was awful enemy design on the NES when Action 52 made us fight paperclips, and it is awful design here, no matter how you spin it. Instead of having interesting animations, designs, and movesets, I have a pencil firing dollar signs at me.
The dating aspect of the game is the most barebones expectation of a dating interface you could possibly expect; go on a date to level up your relationship, go to the dungeon to unlock your next date, give gifts to increase affection... what's offensive is that these systems aren't even implemented *well*. Unlike, say, Dreamscaper, another game in this genre that does the gift-giving thing, you can track and learn about people's preferences based on conversations with them. You can do that in Boyfriend Dungeon too, but you have to do it manually, and the choices are so obvious it's not even fun to intuit them. Hmm, I made a surfboard, I wonder if I should give that to the guy who's main thing is being a SURFER...
I could honestly rag on this game forever, and I don't want to. I wanted to love this game. I even had fun playing it, in parts, because for some reason when the game dumps 20+ enemies on screen the combat actually gets genuinely challenging, and because cute weapons are cute. But when I got to the wet fart of an excuse for an ending I just had to put the game down and write this review. It's depressing how, despite how easy it would be to 100% this game, I can't see myself doing so simply because of how boring it is.
Probably the most disappointing part of the game for me is the writing; Moon Hunters' writing went from okay to pretty good to cringey, but it was dealing with enormous and esoteric concepts. Boyfriend Dungeon is mostly dealing with the awkwardness of personal intimacy, and at no point during any interaction with a date did I feel like I'd made a genuine emotional connection with them. Everyone gets reduced to cliches, and there's barely any voice acting. The voice acting that is there feels stilted and out of place given how much bare text there is, and frequently voice or description lines will allude to or mention things having happened that didn't, or will fail to acknowledge important things the first time they occur. I didn't kiss one of my weapons the entire game, but when the ending came up, of course, they decided to kiss me, because of course that's what people want in an ending, except I didn't and wouldn't have consented to that and had never kissed them previously and yuck. And this whole game is just like that.
Compare this to something like Griftlands, which functions at a far greater level as a proof of concept merging between narrative and roguelike elements, and is a billion times more playable mechanically to boot. At the end of the day I don't know the real reasons why this game is such a disappointment, but I have a hard time not feeling personally aggrieved. I guess if this game has taught me anything, is that our love won't always be reciprocated, and that people we initially think are perfect may turn out to be just human.
Don't buy this game.