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Status: Complete
Site: https://oneirocritica-games.itch.io/love-hues-2020
Pairing: Any/Any or Gen
Description: College meet cutes

Sometimes I watch or play something that makes me feel old. This game did that to me pretty hard. It's a dating VN set on a college campus, where all of the routes appear to be 100% wholesome at all times. For a long time I've been uninterested in any high school stories because my patience with high school drama is at 0. Now it seems I need to update this to some college campus plots too.

Because the path stories are about stuff that happens without you, the paths are devoid of tension. In one scene you literally do nothing but listen to NPCs do some conflict resolution planning. After running through two of these I decided to go for a bad end, and... it was also boring. I picked all the meanest options I could and the game sort of brushed them off for the most part, with the LI still treating me like a friend even though I told them I wasn't interested in things they liked, made them injure themselves, and so on and so forth, and finally I informed them their ex was dating someone else. They got upset about that, the two of us drifted apart, my character stopped caring about the school rivalry, which wasn't resolved, but like, I didn't care. The end.
There is clearly some sort of meta ending that must unlock after investing a little time completing paths, and those paths constantly allude to relationships between LIs that aren't explained in a single run, but if the leadup to the answers isn't interesting I don't know why reveals would be. Most of the time I'm willing to accept that the issue is a taste missmatch when I bounce off of a game like this, but even outside the cute handholdy tone and unappealing characters there are just fundamental problems with how the player character engages with the narrative that makes me feel like this is more a "you're doing great, sweetie" simulator than a story that the player has any stake in. If you're attracted to the fantasy of a supportive friend simulator you might like this. Otherwise I'd avoid.