Thirsty Suitors turns awkward flirting into stylish RPG battles

digitaltrends.com:

What’s more awkward than returning to your hometown? Returning to your hometown and getting hit on by everyone you grew up with.

Thirsty Suitors takes that mortifying experience and turns it into a comedic adventure where every embarrassing run-in with a flirtatious townie becomes a stylish video game battle. It’s a bit like Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, though without the morally murky power dynamics.

I went hands-on with Thirsty Suitors as part of Tribeca Fest and was quickly charmed by its premise. Though it uses over-the-top video game imagery to visualize romance in all of its uncomfortable forms, it’s a sincere and emotionally grounded game that’s full of relatable (and mortifying) social experiences.

In Thirsty Suitors, players take on the role of Jala, a woman heading back to her hometown for her sister’s wedding. The full game promises to put Jala through the ringer as she deals with both overbearing parents and a league of exes — not unlike Scott Pilgrim.

The 2- minute slice I played gave a sense of what those interactions look like when transformed into eclectic gameplay. The demo begins with Jala on the bus home taking a magazine personality quiz. She’s quickly dumped into a colorful sequence where she skateboards from question to question in a Tony Hawk-like minigame. As she skates her way through the personality profile, her anxieties about returning home manifest in the form of her family and friends towering over her.

That’s a small example of the creative lengths Thirsty Suitors goes to in order to visualize abstract emotional concepts. It reminds me a bit of Psychonauts 2 and the way it weaves characters’ worries into ingenious levels and set pieces. Few games have really nailed that idea outside of the