Hatoful Boyfriend review (PC): Don't pigeonhole this dating sim

Release Date: September 4
Platforms available on: PC, Mac, Linux
Developer: Hato Moa, Mediatonic
Publisher: Devolver Digital
Genre: Bird romance, dating simulation

Hatoful Boyfriend is a game about a girl who wants to smooch birds.

It is also so much more than that, but it is important that you go into Hatoful Boyfriend with at least the baseline expectation of pursuing human-on-bird smooching. And it is glorious.

You play as the lone human enrolled at the St. Pigeonation's Institute, a prestigious high school catering to a diverse population of roughly human-sized sentient birds.

Your childhood best friend? A rock dove. Your maths teacher? A quail. The cool kid and resident school bad boy? A fantail pigeon who inexplicably also speaks in affected French on occasion.

Hatoful Boyfriend could have easily devolved into belabored bird jokes and puns for a cheap snicker, but instead opts for a surprisingly cohesive fiction and is all the more hilarious, heartwarming and disturbingly dark for it.

All of this is presented in the style of a visual novel as a parody of Japanese dating sim games.

That is to say, it offers a text-heavy branching storyline where the visuals mostly consist of a portrait of whichever character or characters you are talking to standing against some background scenery. It just so happens that in Hatoful Boyfriend, those character portraits are photographs of birds.

The thing is, it all actually kind of works.

The absurd premise is treated with such absolute deadpan mundanity that it is hard not to be won over by its charm and sucked into the stories of your avian paramours.

And the writing, despite abundant typos, is quite good when it comes to fleshing out your feathered fellows into characters who are worthy of intrigue even if not always worthy of a young girl's affection.

The absurd premise is treated with such absolute deadpan mundanity that it is hard not to be won over by its charm and sucked into the stories of your avian paramours.

Hatoful Boyfriend could have easily devolved into belabored bird jokes and puns for a cheap snicker, but instead opts for a surprisingly cohesive fiction and is all the more hilarious, heartwarming and disturbingly dark for it.

Then things get weird. Yes, in a game about bird smooching, things had not yet gotten weird.

Hatoful Boyfriend is designed to be played multiple times, encouraging you to experiment with branching plot threads in order to see every bird's romantic conclusion.

Just as each subsequent playthrough starts to reach a Groundhog Day-like rhythm, Hatoful Boyfriend dives head first down a rabbit hole of plot that would make Hideo Kojima blush.

And while the sharp turn is unexpected, it is a turn that the game completely earns every step of the way thanks to the balanced tone of its writing.

Sadly, for all of Hatoful Boyfriend's character charm, the game struggles on a technical level. The typo-laden script has already been mentioned, but bears repeating because of the word jumbles that made it past Mediatonic and Devolver Digital's editors.

The crucial epilogue scene, for lack of a better term, also sees your ability to save the game limited to certain rooms without any explanation. It is still possible to save the game outside of these rooms, but loading a save file there causes the game to start up without dialog boxes and making progress impossible. There are no save issues during the main romance plotlines, though.

Yes, Hatoful Boyfriend is a dating game with a bird gimmick, and that alone will be enough to keep many players at arm's length. But to pigeonhole your time at the St. Pigeonation's Institute as a mere gimmick would be a grave misjudgment of a game that is far more delightful and unexpected than even its bizarre premise would suggest.

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