This review contains spoilers
Very fun and goofy romp that is a breath of fresh air to the dating sim genre, especially for queer men and the LGBT community. Definitely messy execution with regards to the gratuitous amounts of leftover data from the cult ending - I think it would have been more fun if they had fully integrated it in the first place, but I understand why they didn't. Overall, lighthearted and fun, would 100% complete again.
It's a straight-forward dating sim featuring dads. I really like the character art in this one but there's not much else going for it. I don't mind playing as an awkward nerd dad but I wanted to be able to have more control over his personality and backstory to make subsequent playthroughs more interesting. I ended up dating Mat and I was completely satisfied with his route so I don't feel the need to explore the other romances.
Fuck the Game Grumps workplace. Julian and especially DingDongVG didn't deserve even a second of what they went through. Bad game, bad company, fuck em all
This is genuinely the worst. I've always hated post-Jon Game Grumps and found it to be extremely unfunny, and that description fits Dream Daddy perfectly. You can tell that it was a product that was specifically just made to pander. Practices like this disgust me, and the product to come out of it is a horrible, humorless, boring, and pandering piece of crap that never should've been put out. Stay far away from this pile. Exploiting the gay community with this shitty ass game was a terrible thing to do, and the recent news about Ding Dong (a gay man) being abused by his coworkers at the Game Grumps office just because he critiqued the game is just all the more telling.
a dad has fallen for a dad in lego city. was the wholesome games discourse already in swing when this came out? i feel like it was kind of ahead of the curve and was left to very quietly age like milk. a toothless and hollow experience at its core. this game has absolutely nothing interesting to say and holds a barely restrained contempt for its subject matter and audience at large. i am giving it an extra star out of respect for my enjoyment of it as a completely brainless teenager.
The love that older men share together is so desirable to me. I’ve always longed to grow older with another man, with our storgic, companionate love maturing with age. I wish I could say Dream Daddy fits a niche that would appeal greatly to me, but the extremely tacky humor and manufactured conflicts straight out of a family sitcom destroy any genuineness that could be gleamed from this depiction of love. Yes, it’s done on purpose, but ironic shitposting is still shitposting and this desperate effort to create a “safe space” game works against it to feel like some sort of cynical joke with queer men at the butt of it. I know the writers (a straight man and a queer woman) claimed they wanted to avoid writing about experiences they didn’t know, but I honestly would have much preferred they did consult queer men and gave it their best shot instead of this neutered garbage designed to be as straight-ally-friendly as possible at our own expense.
I want to talk about Joseph’s route because it’s the only one that attempts to confront any sort of complicated relationship dynamic, and even its best ending is intentionally dissatisfying. There’s actually a sense of artistic ambition to it in theory, even if it still suffers from horribly stilted writing like the rest of the VN. Yet, the route was torn to shreds even by many fans: it was cruel, it was homophobic, it was bad representation, et cetera. On one hand, I can’t entirely fault people for being unable to recognize this as a commentary on a specific sub-set of queer men that exist when the rest of the game does so much to distance itself from any sense of reality. But, it’s also just so disheartening when people use a fixation on optics and surface-level representation analysis to shout down any story that so much as gestures towards uniquely queer pain.
I want to talk about Joseph’s route because it’s the only one that attempts to confront any sort of complicated relationship dynamic, and even its best ending is intentionally dissatisfying. There’s actually a sense of artistic ambition to it in theory, even if it still suffers from horribly stilted writing like the rest of the VN. Yet, the route was torn to shreds even by many fans: it was cruel, it was homophobic, it was bad representation, et cetera. On one hand, I can’t entirely fault people for being unable to recognize this as a commentary on a specific sub-set of queer men that exist when the rest of the game does so much to distance itself from any sense of reality. But, it’s also just so disheartening when people use a fixation on optics and surface-level representation analysis to shout down any story that so much as gestures towards uniquely queer pain.