Thirsty Suitors mini-review: Fixing what you broke | Kaser Focus

venturebeat.com:

Are you looking to showcase your brand in front of the brightest minds of the gaming industry? Consider getting a custom GamesBeat sponsorship. Learn more.

Usually when I play a relatively short indie game, I find more often than not that its length is satisfactory (see: Jusant). Rarely do I think “That needed to be at least three or four hours longer.” But Outerloop’s Thirsty Suitors is a rare exception, because I wanted more room for everything this game was trying to do. As it is, the game feels exceptionally overstuffed with gameplay, story and culture (for lack of a better word). Thirsty Suitors is an absolute riot, in the sense that it’s a chaotic mix of color and sound and that it’s hilarious. It’s not perfect, but its flaws come from trying to do too much rather than overt minimalism.

You play as Jala Jayaratne, a South Asian American woman returning to her hometown with her tail between her legs years after disappearing on both her strict-but-loving family and her legion of exes. Now she must try to make amends for her years as a heartbreaker and prove herself to her disappointed parents in the main story, while doing such side quests as investigating a skate-park cult, fending off her grandmother’s well-meaning matchmaking attempts and cooking a mouthwatering variety of South Asian food.

Everything in Thirsty Suitors is an exaggerated take on real experiences — in particular, the boss battles with Jala’s exes take place in their inner worlds where their arguments are imagined as turn-based battles. But that’s not to say the actual experiences themselves are taken lightly. On the contrary, Thirsty Suitors delves into the kinds of story topics that games rarely touch upon and in a way that makes it easy to