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Hatoful Boyfriend (PC) Review

 
Hatoful Boyfriend header
Hatoful Boyfriend header
Hatoful Boyfriend header

 
At a Glance...
 

Formats: PC
 
Genre:
 
Year:
 
Publisher:
 
Developer:
 
Final Score
4.5
4.5/ 10


User Rating
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We liked?


  • An original spin on the dating sim genre, with a darker backstory behind its cutesy, feather-filled fun.

Not so much?


  • You're a human girl who dates birds. It doesn't get much sillier than this.


Final Fiendish Findings?

St Pigeonation’s is an exclusive school for the best and brightest birds, and they’ve just accepted you as their first and only human student. You’re excited to be studying at such a prestigious establishment, but as the school year progresses, it looks like more than mere friendship might blossom between you and a very special […]

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Posted September 30, 2014 by

 
Full Fiendish Findings...
 
 

St Pigeonation’s is an exclusive school for the best and brightest birds, and they’ve just accepted you as their first and only human student. You’re excited to be studying at such a prestigious establishment, but as the school year progresses, it looks like more than mere friendship might blossom between you and a very special avian companion. But which of your feathered friends is destined to set your heart aflutter?

hatoful-boyfriend image 2

Dating sims are popular in Japan, and over the years, a fair few of them have made it over to the Western world. The premise is simple – you read through the illustrated text-based adventures of the protagonist, and make decisions at key points which determine which of the game’s eligible partners you end up with. In general, it’s not unreasonable to expect your prospective love interests to be, if not entirely human, then at least humanoid. When it comes to Hatoful Boyfriend, however, the protagonist is the only human – all the other characters are intelligent birds.

At first, this seems like a silly gimmick to raise interest in an otherwise unremarkable game. Your first few playthroughs will last no more than half an hour each, and will swiftly propel you through a year at St Pigeonation’s, during which time you must catch the eye of your chosen bird. The graphics are simple, the characters are shallow, and the premise of a human-bird relationship just a little too silly to swallow (for those of you who might be worried at this point, there is no adult content – chaste hugs and ‘hand’-holding are as intimate as it gets).

hatoful-boyfriend image 1

Carry on playing, however, and things start to get a bit darker. Why do you live alone in a cave in the middle of field? What is that ruined city you glimpse on your running route? Why is the school’s doctor so creepy? And how exactly did birds become the dominant life form on the planet anyway? To find out if and when these questions are to be answered, there’s only one thing for it – you’ll have to keep going.

Even if you decide to see everything it has to offer, Hatoful Boyfriend is still a short game – topping out at around five hours of play, or perhaps less if you keep your finger on the fast forward button. Be warned, however, unlike big name dating sims, the game doesn’t stop you from skipping text you’ve already read, plus there’s no rewind button to reread anything you accidentally skipped over. A more serious problem is that the save system is broken – sometimes you can save and reload a game just fine, but often the loaded game will just freeze, forcing you to quit and start over.

 

Final Thoughts

Even by the standards of Japanese dating sims (or at least the ones that get translated into English), Hatoful Boyfriend is an odd game. Its strangeness is obviously its selling point, but even so, the game is so short and so silly that it’s not worth dropping more than a few pounds worth of spare change on. A must-have for real bird fanciers only.


Jo

 


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