There’s a lot of charm in Thirsty Suitors; like many games that have bubbled up in the III 2020s game scene, Suitors combines a streamlined old hat form of gameplay with a degree of nuanced and unconventional, for the medium, storytelling that seeks to both direct audiences towards investigation of the mechanics which we see has, at this point, having no real origin or persuasion of consequence as well as to investigate the storytelling potential of these mechanics which were previously associated with the water-sealing of narrative via a gamified rhythm: instead of simplifying a eventage down to systematised components which abstractions, many of these indie games abstract the narrative via the mechanical persuasion which is the accepted grammar of the medium. Less now are we to see the turn based combat of Cloud and Barret as stand in for a quick and scattered skirmish, and more we see Jala and Andile performing that calculus in their minds, when during a fight with an intimate, that will most calculatedly burn the person they are opposite to in the conflict.
I think that’s what Thirsty Suitors is trying to accomplish. The cataloguing of emotional lashing out is there in the turn based combat, skateboarding’s reinterpretation of town architecture away from its traversal by spheres of adults who could not possibly grasp your higher ordered comprehension of spaces and uses (much like a cult’s layered cognizance of societal order, at least so goes the cult narrative with Soundie and his acolytes), the cooking as purely a confidence game which is nitpicked for process instead of product. These all seem to gel to the various narrative sectors which Thirsty Suitors puts forward. Much like in the desperation gambling of Citizen Sleeper or the rearrangement of narrative moralia by mere placement of component parts within Storyteller, I respect the investigation of stories unfamiliar to games with mechanics which seem well trod at this point. It’s a necessary act in how games and their developers come to actualising the art in more holistic ways.
However, the play of these new grammar-mechanical investigations in Suitors is just so tedious and turgid. The combat is simplistic and rote, the skateboarding is unexpressive and cumbersome, the cooking is useless to the game item economy and overlong for the pay out. Every moment of sitting with the game’s characters is cheapened by sidling them into mechanical expressions which simplify their agency into horrible fetch quests conveyed from mote to mote by ‘knock off Antonio Eagle’s Amateur Skater on mobile’ level traversal, traversal which culminates in repetitive and reductive combat with characters who are not lent any illumination by the interplay of the caustic conflict at the heart of Suitors central mechanical metaphor. I’m no fan of Undertale, but for a game to come this long after that game’s elegant solution to turn based empathy and still fail in this regard is shocking.
I adore the representation of trans and queer characters here, and I love that there’s basically not a white person in this PNW American town. But I also find it a bit insulting that to find this representation, representation which legitimately treats the experiences had by POC and queer people as fundamentally different than their counterparts (looking at you, every CRPG ever), gamers of this demographic are constantly roped into games which simplify mechanics unto nothing demanding rigour, either in skill or consequence, requiring no actual engagement beyond pushing buttons as if the simulation was a child’s speak and spell.
I think that’s what Thirsty Suitors is trying to accomplish. The cataloguing of emotional lashing out is there in the turn based combat, skateboarding’s reinterpretation of town architecture away from its traversal by spheres of adults who could not possibly grasp your higher ordered comprehension of spaces and uses (much like a cult’s layered cognizance of societal order, at least so goes the cult narrative with Soundie and his acolytes), the cooking as purely a confidence game which is nitpicked for process instead of product. These all seem to gel to the various narrative sectors which Thirsty Suitors puts forward. Much like in the desperation gambling of Citizen Sleeper or the rearrangement of narrative moralia by mere placement of component parts within Storyteller, I respect the investigation of stories unfamiliar to games with mechanics which seem well trod at this point. It’s a necessary act in how games and their developers come to actualising the art in more holistic ways.
However, the play of these new grammar-mechanical investigations in Suitors is just so tedious and turgid. The combat is simplistic and rote, the skateboarding is unexpressive and cumbersome, the cooking is useless to the game item economy and overlong for the pay out. Every moment of sitting with the game’s characters is cheapened by sidling them into mechanical expressions which simplify their agency into horrible fetch quests conveyed from mote to mote by ‘knock off Antonio Eagle’s Amateur Skater on mobile’ level traversal, traversal which culminates in repetitive and reductive combat with characters who are not lent any illumination by the interplay of the caustic conflict at the heart of Suitors central mechanical metaphor. I’m no fan of Undertale, but for a game to come this long after that game’s elegant solution to turn based empathy and still fail in this regard is shocking.
I adore the representation of trans and queer characters here, and I love that there’s basically not a white person in this PNW American town. But I also find it a bit insulting that to find this representation, representation which legitimately treats the experiences had by POC and queer people as fundamentally different than their counterparts (looking at you, every CRPG ever), gamers of this demographic are constantly roped into games which simplify mechanics unto nothing demanding rigour, either in skill or consequence, requiring no actual engagement beyond pushing buttons as if the simulation was a child’s speak and spell.