Yakuza-like Thirsty Suitors’ most radical act? Joy
Jala doesn’t go to bed without saying goodnight to her father. Each night after Jala backflips out of her jacket and kicks off her shoes, she joins him on the couch until she falls asleep to the sounds of dad shows: Cold War documentaries and her taped childhood basketball games, naturally. After years away from her family, Jala allows herself to soften for a moment in their support. And each night, once Jala falls asleep, her father slings her onto his back to carry his adult daughter upstairs.
Thirsty Suitors from Outerloop Games is a skateboarding, romance, cooking, and turn-based combat game — a baby Yakuza, as Outerloop Games co-founder and Thirsty Suitors director Chandana Ekanayake described it to Polygon. Beyond the labels assigned to any upcoming video game, Thirsty Suitors is a game about “the fantasy of breaking cycles of generational trauma,” narrative designer Meghna Jayanth said. But it’s also about community-building and radical joy.
“It’s not just about Black and brown trauma, right? There’s joy in the experience and fantasy of it, too,” Ekanayake said. Jayanth added: “The most radical thing that we’re doing here is allowing the protagonist to inhabit this queer, brown woman joyfully. It’s a sad thing that it’s still deeply unusual in the industry.”
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The game begins as the player-character Jala returns home after years away; she left Timber Hills — some might say abandoned it — years back, leaving a stream of exes in her wake. Returning home means confronting the harm she’s created between herself and her community — family, friends, and everyone in between. Outerloop Games uses all of Thirsty Suitors’ different activities to tell these stories, each tapping into an essential narrative line,
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