Doodle Date, a game that has been out on Steam for a week, and can be bought for the low, low price of two dollars, is not at all what I expected. I expected a dating sim with more player input than usual. What I got was a surreal journey of attempted murder, identity crisis, and divorce.
The game is described by its developer, Nicholas Lives, as a dating sim where you can "romance, seduce, and even marry your own drawings"—the ultimate in customizable dates, surely? Looking at the Steam Community section, I saw what people's creativity had spawned, and even though it was pretty much entirely dominated by anime tiddy, I could see that my only boundaries were my own imagination and drawing skills.
Aside from that, perhaps one of the first red flags letting me know that this game was not the dating game I expected was the speed with which everything happened—for all of ten seconds, I was a human, then suddenly, I was living in a notebook, introduced to a strange woman-drawing named Claire who proclaimed that she had missed me. She told me the rules of the game—draw something and it comes to life—and asked me to demonstrate my drawing my favorite fruit.
