![]() Pigeonation's school for gifted birds, the most prestigious academy of it's kind - but unlike your contemporaries, you're the school's one and only human student. The game opens at the beginning of your second year at St. Particularly if you've always wanted to get into the pants of a particularly fit pigeon (not literally of course - pigeons don't wear pants). They're not the sort of games for everybody, but if you're the sort of person who appreciates slower-paced, more story-driven games, then Hatoful Boyfriend is likely to be right up your street. In English, that means it's essentially a choose-your-own-adventure-book, but in game form, with the only gameplay to speak of being a heck of a lot of reading and picking the occasional conversation option. Now, before we get started, it's worth noting that Hatoful Boyfriend is a visual novel - and a dating sim one at that. And, as a downloadable game from the Playstation Store, priced at £7.99 (which nets you both the Playstation 4 and PS Vita versions), it's also a bargainiferous little title for those of you in need of a little romance and randomness. Given our love of story-driven games, bird-themed dating sim (yes, you read that right) Hatoful Boyfriend has been up there on our list of wants ever since it was announced. It's a fascinating jaunt, but may be just too weird for some.If only we'd had a tank when that turkey was assaulting us.īut hey, I'm always willing to give things a second try - at least in a digital, non-threatening form. If the idea of chatting up pigeons in a Japanese high-school seems like your sort of thing, then it really is the best representation of that available, it's just that that's all it is. Carve it into your soul: while I’m glad games like Hatoful Boyfriend can exist, the game itself left me feeling fowl. It’s not so much a game as a piece of interaction fiction and looked at through that lens it’s an achievement.īut I just can’t bring myself to recommend it. In line with other Japanese dating sims you’re getting a beautiful background with a still photo of a bird on it, and some text. I feel like I should give it a pass because it so obviously exists in a niche game and has clear limitations. You’re not making any meaningful choices beyond the obtuse multiple choice questions, and a lot of the opening third doesn’t seem to care which choice you choose. The problem for me is that there’s no real sense of agency. The inclusion of this feature is a boon, but is it a good thing to skip through 80% of a game on repeated play-throughs? Once I'd read that part of the story once there was no reason to experience it again. I was often bored, skipping most of the dialogue I’d seen before. I'm sorry.”īut the good script often wasn’t enough. I hadn’t seen the signs, hadn’t realised that being a helpful student had made me into a temptress for the authority figure.“Listen,” he said, letting me down gently “I'm no longer able to love another creature. These aren’t well signposted so my first play-through say me accidentally trying to date my teacher. You follow a predetermined path which occasionally branch off to deliver you to different choices, a different ending. My first play-through took a couple of hours with subsequent runs taking thirty to forty minutes. There’s no denying the game got its talons into me, but I found myself resenting it for the effort I was having to put in to get to the bottom of things. This means things can quickly get tired as you replay through the game multiple times: but if you don’t replay the game you can’t find out what exactly is wrong with the world. It’s a game designed to be replayed, but a lot of the core experience is built from the same basic structure. There’s no puzzles, no “gameplay”, you’re just reading text and looking at pictures of birds like a sexy pigeon book. There is twisted brilliance to the world laid out before you and it’s the games saving grace, because while i’m not here to argue about what is and isn’t a game, Hatoful Boyfriend doesn’t have any of the trappings you might expect from one, especially after it’s ended up on Sony’s plastic funbox.
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