7/26/2023 0 Comments Hatoful boyfriend death endingI couldn’t help thinking as I played about some of the arguments in Creatures Such as We, especially the idea that it’s hard to explore consent in a game in which all NPCs are prizes for the protagonist. In contrast with a lot of “ultimate ending” finales, though, the unlockable content in Hatoful Boyfriend is both much longer than the per-suitor stories, and of a different genre: a horrific mystery, rather than a romance, and one that does a lot to explain how a world of sentient pigeons has come about. As with many other dating sims, the game is designed to be replayed to unlock new content: you begin by romancing different suitors and finding out their secrets, which then allows you to access a different ending to the story. Quite a lot has already been written about Hatoful Boyfriend, often by people more familiar than I am with visual novel conventions - though the visual novel community, like the gamebook community, often seems so relevant to interactive fiction that it’s a little mystifying that there isn’t more communication. What initially seems like a whimsical premise gradually develops a bit more depth there’s even a website devoted to the writings of a prominent in-world pigeon blogger. You are a female human attending an otherwise all-bird school, and you have your choice of pigeons, quails, and doves, each possessing a characteristic personality. Hatoful Boyfriend is a visual novel of the dating sim genre(ish), in which all of the possible romantic leads are birds.
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