Sucker for Love: First Date is a horror dating sim game. You’ve read that right! The game was once a part of the Dread X Collection with only one Elder God available for dating by the Eldritch Abomination lovers.
But, due to its huge popularity, Akabaka and DreadXP have released an extended version of the game where players are given a chance to meet a number of Goddesses, each of whom is a part of Lovecraftian pantheon of the Old Gods. These Great Old Ones are incredibly important and fearsome creatures, frequently of the same age as the universe.
Worshipped by human and inhuman cults, they usually exist outside of the normal space-time and possess huge, incomprehensible physical forms. However, in Sucker for Love: First Date they are presented as three fully-voiced “dateable” “girls” that the player is tasked to kiss. I hope you don’t mind some tentacles?
However, it isn’t as easy to live long enough to meet this moment!
Our Darling protagonist is obsessed with the occult and dreams of summoning eldritch horrors into his reality. However, where others might be looking for wealth or power or revenge, our hero is out for some Old God smooching!
Darling spends all his cash to purchase a strange, bright-pink Necronomicon to sate his thirst for the occult and the biggest Eldritch girls in all realities. Being in the same room with the great cosmic terror, the loss of vital organs and death will not get in the way of Darling’s smooching! He is ready to sacrifice everyone and everything, including Earth and reality itself, to make his restless dreams reality.
The only exception is his sanity, for it is already gone.
His obsession with smooches is so great that even the outwordly incarnations of madness consider him too far gone. So if you ever wanted to subdue an Eldritch Horror with the sheer power of your unbridled horny devotion, the game can give you a chance at that.
The game introduces us and Darling to three separate Goddesses.
The first E-girl on Darling’s list is no other than Cthulhu, Master of R’lyeh and the Great Dreamer itself.
Cthulhu in its female form goes by the name of Ln’eta and is a very jealous but extremely cute and amorous tentacled horror. Her book gives players an opportunity to date her through a series of bloody Eldritch rituals and offerings, the summoning of terrors that can destroy the world on their own.
The successful date itself will end in the destruction of the known reality, but a smooch with those cute tentacles is worth it, right?
Not to spoil the alternatives, but… Squid is fine, too!
The second dating candidate is Hastur, also known as the Unspeakable, He Who Is Not to Be Named or the King in Yellow. In the game, his female form is that of Estir, a very capricious, selfish and spoiled lady wearing a mask and a yellow dress. Dating sim or not, you gotta stay true to the Lovecraftian canon!
She can only appear where the light of her planet, the star called Carcosa, penetrates. You can summon the star to Earth and perform the deadly planet-to-planet kiss if you so desire.
Each of Estir’s Eldritch rituals is a theatrical performance in old English, a mistake in which will lead to Dearest’s terrible and unimaginable death.
In her free time, Estir likes to steal boyfriends from Ln’eta, who might or might not be her half-sister.
The finalist of the Eldritch girl list is Nyarlathotep, known as the God of a Thousand Forms and Crawling Chaos among other fantastic titles. To Dog, as she calls the protagonist of the game, she appears as Auntie Nyan Nyan, a very eccentric cat girl with a fancy bow on her tail.
Auntie Nyan Nyan, as she insists to be called, arrived in Dog’s world to break him up with her Eldritch nieces to prevent the premature destruction of reality. The fact is, this reality exists in the dream of fifty slumbering Elder Gods and if the protagonist is successful in smooching them, it means end times for all.
A date with Nyarlathotep is a real test of your resolve. If you obediently follow her instructions and perform a ritual she wishes you to, you will forever lose the opportunity to kiss other Goddesses.
However, there are other, hidden rituals in her books. Depending on whether you are able to find them, perform them correctly and guess what terrors the Auntie had unleashed on you, you might be able to have a meeting with the other beloved Goddesses.
Auntie Nyan Nyan will inflict a lot of horrors onto our horny hero, with each being repelled by its own ritual, so you need to guess correctly what is afflicting you and repel it in time. Doing so will succeed in scaring Nyarlathotep herself. For what feeling is stronger than fear?! That’s right, lov– Lust!
Despite the Elder Gods being presented as cute, quirky waifu material, Sucker for Love: First Date knows how to present its horror elements in a scary way: bloody rituals, terrible spells and their consequences.
The developers play magnificently with contrasts: a cute mask of the Golden Crow immediately flashes to skin torn off of one’s face, lovely cake and a bloody scene swap one another, etc. All of this colorfully complements the Horror element of the game.
Note: the Steam key was provided for the purposes of this review.
