Thirsty Suitors

Thirsty Suitors is a fantastic game. Skateboarding, turn based battles, cooking games, and a great story. It's sort of like Persona mixed with a little bit of Yakuza (the minigames and sidequests). I adore the art style. The whole thing is voice acted and the characters are great. Can't recommend it enough, if these things are your cup of tea.

is good

Amazing game, quality writing & campy humor

A great little creative game that surprised me quite a bit. It's wacky, really charming with some of the design choices made (the over the top animations is so good), serious and interpersonal, and just overall a pretty neat game despite some of its jankiness. It resolves itself a bit too quick at times, but the premise is great. You play as Jala who is a queer Indian woman in her mid 20s who has come back to her hometown after running away from it unceremoniously—she is a mess, and simply needs time to find herself whilst also attempting to redeem herself for anything she's done in the past. However, the big surprise is that your sister is getting married within the month and your grandmother is also going to visit, so literally everything is going to blow up within the family as the reunion is going to kick off. The gameplay itself is very simple from the turn based combat and quick time event cooking, but it really allows for the focus to be on Jala's relationship with others and her parents. Jala will continuously be given an opportunity to talk it out with others during these regular gameplay beats which I thought was great. Plus, I should mention that the skating was someth…

SCORE: ★★★★★ THE BREAKDOWN +Gorgeous art-style and colorful graphics +An interesting cast of characters who are fascinatingly terrible people +Novel boss-rush take on an almost Scott Pilgrim-esque concept +Enjoyable battles that feel well-paced +Feels authentically queer with a lack of corporate blandness -The skateboarding travel minigame’s a bit too prominent for how basic it is Thirsty Suitors’ protagonist, Jala, is an absolutely awful person. Crucially, she’s an equally fantastic character – layered, complex, sometimes even sympathetic – but as an actual human being? Just a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ spirit, as one of my favorite NPCs from another game once said. And the game knows it; dare I say, it even revels in it. Hell, the introduction has Jala on a long bus ride home to move back in with her parents, necessitated because the whirlwind romance she’d abandoned everyone she knew for blew up in her face and left her stranded in another state. From there, this colorful and deeply queer adventure only turns into more and more of a glorious disaster, and I was utterly here for it from start to finish thanks to its deft writing and surprisingly fun turn-based combat system. Structured almost…

Thirsty Suitors is one of the weirdest and most refreshing games I've played. It's a chaotic mix of turn-based combat, cooking, skateboarding, romance, family drama, and cultural identity; and somehow it all comes together. What stood out to me most is the queer representation. Jala is a queer Indian-American woman, but the game doesn't reduce her identity to a checkbox or make her a perfect representation of anything. She's messy, selfish, funny, insecure, and makes plenty of mistakes. The other queer characters are also given their own experiences rather than being treated as interchangeable. I especially appreciated that the game can talk about coming out, family expectations, rejection, relationships, and cultural identity without making the entire story miserable. The queer characters are allowed to be complicated people, not just tragic stories or inspirational figures. The gameplay is just as unconventional. The "arguments as turn-based battles" concept is hilarious and surprisingly effective, although the combat can get repetitive. The cooking and skateboarding sections are fun, but it's definitely the characters, writing, and presentation that carry the game. It's colo…