I’ve played a lot of dating sims in my day, and they can start to feel samey after a while: you have a set number of dates on which to see pre-programmed events with limited input, and you work towards going out with someone. We’ve seen a few truly unique dating sims over the years, too, games that stand with their quirky heads firmly above the sea of titles where you’re wooing cute anime waifus.
There’s Hatoful Boyfriend where you’re dating birds,Dream Daddythat offers a selection of hot DILFs,Doki Doki Literature Clubwhich turned the genre on its head with a dark psychological horror twist, and the upcomingDate Everything!where you’ll befriend and date your sexy household furniture.
It’s not often that dating gets outrightcompetitive, though. At PAX West this year, I checked out the newly announced “PvP dating sim” Pick Me Pick Me, and to say that my curiosity was piqued by the concept is an understatement. The only information I had to go on when I walked into the Seattle Convention Center was an appointment time and that elevator pitch of the game.
As the game begins, my IRL competitor and I each spun a wheel to randomize what our characters looked like, with extremely limited ability to stop to select what you actually wanted. My spin decided that I would be a bald, Black man in a red t-shirt named Bob, while my opponent was Alice, a girl with teal hair and no top – a bold strategy to try winning over a potential suitor, I must say. With Bob and Alice designed, named, and ready for love, we headed to a restaurant to meet our date.
In Pick Me Pick Me, you and your opponent will both sit down with the same date and take turns answering their questions. You get a question or prompt, and a text bubble in which to type any answer you’d like. Pick Me Pick Me is made using an LLM - a language learning model - and will require in-game purchases after a set number of hours playing. The LLM costs Optillusion to use, and buying the game comes with 30-40 hours of gameplay before you’re asked to purchase “tokens” in order to keep playing.
The person you’re on a date with will flip their focus between the two of you after each answer, and they’ll ride the wave of what the previous person replied with to ask you your next question. For example, my competitor told this girl we were pursuing that Alice enjoys a balance of darkness and light in life, and our date then turned to ask if I fancy myself an optimist or a pessimist.
For about 15 minutes, we split her attention, each trying to give better answers than the other and butter her up. Throughout the date, you’ll get cards that allow you to screw over your opponent in some way when they give their next answer, whether that’s by limiting the list of words they’re able to use to a select few that they must shoot off the screen as they fly quickly past, or even providing a single word that theymustuse in their sentence (the reply won’t submit if they don’t).
I lucked out in having to use “dope” in one of my answers, with the game’s AI intelligent and modern enough to understand “dope” as slang, so she appreciated it when Bob told her he thinks happiness was “pretty dope”. Meanwhile, my opponent needed to find a way to seamlessly get “betwixt” into the sentence, so he told our date that Alice “weaves betwixt two emotions” as needed depending on the situation at hand.
Your overall goal is to fill a meter in the bottom corner of the screen, which fills gradually in increments with every answer depending on how your date feels about the reply – the more your date vibes with your reply, the more it fills. As the date progresses, your opponent may even be able to see what the date is thinking about you as a competitor.
For example, our date was thinking about how Bob was a little forward, with answers that seemed to be carefully curated to impress her instead of being genuine, but that thought didn’t appear for me to see on my screen - only my competitor got to see how our date felt about me. Maybe I shouldn’t have responded with “you” when she asked me what I love the most as my very first question…
In the end, even though I had filled my meter more than my competitor, it wasn’t enough to win our date’s heart completely. Neither Bob nor Alice got the girl in the end, and she left us both at the restaurant slumped sadly in our seats. Though I might not have been successful in my first attempt at competitive dating, I’m excited to try again when the full game launches – I can already see my friends and I royally screwing each other in the name of romance.
PAX West
PAX West began life as the Penny Arcade Expo, a celebration of gaming culture hosted by the creators of the titular webcomic. Held in Seattle, it draws over 100,000 visitors.
