Thirsty Suitors

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 something neat to just chill out with as it's the natural way that Jala goes about town—it does get challenging/demanding, but you can always just throw in the towel at the more optional stuff. It does affect your characters level, but you can always just play on an easier difficulty if you don't want to engage with it.

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 like an inverse Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, Thirsty Suitors is what its Steam page describes as a ‘Breakup Simulator’. Three years ago, Jala imploded her entire life for a new lover and moved away from the town she grew up in, but that was hardly her first irresponsible and reckless decision. Even before that, she left a trail of bitter exes in her wake – some who she took full advantage of, and others who were just as trashy as her – and the bill’s come due now that she’s returned home. As if that weren’t enough, Jala’s more responsible and well-liked older sister, who’s such a dominant presence in her life that even Jala’s own vicious and biting conscience takes her form, is getting married, really driving home her inferiority issues. Even worse? The family matriarch, Grandmother Paati, will be visiting from India for the wedding, a bit of news treated by everyone Jala knows as something akin to Godzilla approaching the coast of Japan. What this means in terms of gameplay structure is that as Jala skates around town either making amends or causing problems, she’s beset by enemies and confronts her exes in what’s fundamentally a dialogue-heavy, turn-based battling system where she resolves her issues with the person she’s fighting. Since these fights largely take place in a sort of mindscape, there’s little need for them to remain beholden to the rules of reality, and the game wastes little time in getting over-the-top with it. Aggressive skateboard tricks, projectile basketballs, and kaiju-sized parental summons are part and parcel of Thirsty Suitors’ combat, and while it’s not particularly deep, there’s a ton of fun to be had in balancing flirtatious taunts with ego-puncturing insults mid-fight to exploit a foe’s weaknesses. The boss fights against the aforementioned exes are this concept at its best, where Jala’s forced to confront everything she did to wrong her former paramours while battling their idealized selves. These elaborate setpieces never failed to delight me, ranging from a Bollywood-inspired dance battle with Jala’s third-grade ex to drowning in guilt while the pet cat of the nicest person she ever dated turns into a gigantic, spectral tiger and tries to maul her. Thankfully, despite Jala’s best efforts to self-sabotage, she’s not completely alone. Flaws and all, Jala’s undeniably charismatic and charming, and it’s quickly made obvious why she’s such a heartbreaker; even her exes have to work really hard to stay mad at her, and they usually wind up being as helpful as often as they are opponents. Outside of combat, the player can spend quality time cooking with Jala’s father (and sometimes with her stricter but ultimately caring mother), performing Cooking Mama-inspired minigames while confiding about her issues. She can skateboard around town, hang out with her incredibly muscular aunt, infiltrate a cult of teenagers by proving herself in Tony Hawk-style trick challenges, and more. For how short the game is, there’s plenty of variety; my only real complaint is that while skateboarding for the competitions is fun enough, Jala’s literally incapable of just walking around, and I found skating around town when running errands a bit more irritating than just being able to run would have been due to stopping and changing directions feeling unwieldy. But I’d be remiss not to underscore on how incredibly steeped in culture Thirsty Suitors is, and I don’t just mean one specific one. Because Jala’s a pansexual Indian woman, there’s a lot of focus on queer themes and her relationship with her family, but I can’t emphasize enough just how deep this goes. I’m always grateful to see diverse representation in gaming, but it’s difficult to ignore how corporate it can often feel, an approved level of easily digestible gayness that won’t upset any but the most extreme conservatives. Not so with Thirsty Suitors. Even when interacting with her male exes, Jala is undeniably and proudly queer; from how she dresses to how she talks, there’s an authentic familiarity with the code-switching, the expectations, the cultural hegemony of heteronormative ideals that she’s constantly aware of. In Thirsty Suitors, homophobia and misogyny do not wear the face of ignorant rednecks wielding their bigotry like blunt instruments; they’re more insidious, in a way that’s both heartfelt and surprisingly sad considering the otherwise comedic tone of the game. At one point, Jala wonders if she’d maybe be less messy and problematic if she just ‘played straight’ and married her safe, but boring male ex she used to date. Her non-binary ex, Andile, is muscular and bearded, and questions out loud if they’re obligated to feminize themselves more in order to not be mistaken for male. This isn’t in response to someone calling these characters slurs or dramatic confrontations; it’s the kind of self-examination queer people are simply always pressured to do, that becomes instinct because of the society around them, and sometimes the intrusive thoughts win. But as predominantly queer as the game is, Thirsty Suitors dives just as deeply into other issues. Its examination of Indian culture is both deeply loving and unapologetically critical. Some of the sweetest moments in the game are when Jala is learning a traditional recipe from her father, and it’s clear that she has a lot of love for the culture she hails from. But she’s also seen how immigrating to the United States changed her family, how much her being so queer puts a strain on those who aren’t used to it, the almost primal fear her mother has of her grandmother and how deeply-rooted it is. For such an over-the-top, cartoonish game, these moments are often surprisingly subtle and tense, but the release that comes from resolution is masterfully done, made all the more impressive by the fact it’s often happening during a ridiculous boss fight where Jala powers up through a training montage with her aunt. All that, and there’s still more I could say; this doesn’t even get into how the ‘skateboard cult’ Jala infiltrates is a completely transparent critique of how much teenagers are let down by modern society, and how the destruction of the third space and absence of opportunities to bond leaves them susceptible to harm from those who would exploit them. Thirsty Suitors is an incredible labor of love that wields its humor with finesse to explore just how deeply it affects us to open our hearts to people and how responsible we are for the feelings of others. If it were a walking simulator or adventure game, I’d still like it, but the fact it so elegantly juggles this with a fully-fledged battle system, skateboarding game, and Persona-lite reputation mechanic means it’s also a videogame-ass videogame, and a great one at that.