After hitching a ride with her now ex-girlfriend from her small hometown of Timber Hills 3 years ago, Jala Jayaratne finally decides to return. However returning is the easy part, facing her family and old flings on the other hand, will be a completely different story. Without further ado, it is time to jump into the hot mess that is Jala’s love life with our review of Thirsty Suitors!

Combat

After returning to her hometown, Jala finds out that she does not have a ride back to her parents house. Luckily, she stumbles across one of the many old flings that she has made a permanent impact on, Sergio. This brings us to the first instance of combat in the game. Combat is fairly straightforward for a turn-based RPG. You have your health bar and willpower, and a single action per turn to spend on one of four actions, with those actions relying on quick time events (QTE) to ensure you deal enough damage. Basic attacks give you back willpower, taunts prey upon the target’s insecurities and inflict a debuff on them, skills can take advantage of these debuffs to deal significantly more damage, and finally items can give enemies insecurities in addition to the standard healing, buffing and debuffing found in other games.

While a fairly simple system, there are a couple things that make it a bit more interesting. Each of the taunts, while lasting only for a small period of time, inflict a change in stats. Someone who is heartbroken takes damage every turn, but are more emotional and thus both hit harder and crit more. As such, using certain taunts are riskier than others as improper use can lead to you losing a fight. What makes this taunt system more interesting is that certain enemies are only able to be affected by at least one or two of the five possible taunts. While it is possible to blindly guess which one the enemy is weak to, it creates an interesting minigame of trying to analyze what type of taunt would cause the most psychological damage to the opponent. 

All of these fights lean into one of Thirsty Suitor’s stronger suits, that being its art style. Each of the moves that you use, as well as the ones the opponent uses against you are all over-the-top goofy, all of which blends seamlessly with the surrounding world. The first couple of moves involve you creating a basketball out of thin air followed up by dunking it on the opponents and summoning a several story tall version of your mom to crush the enemy with her sandals. If this does not set the scene for the type of theatrics this game brings to the table, I am not sure what will.

Like with many families, there is nothing scarier than an angry mother with a sandal.

Skateboarding and Cooking

Besides combat, there are two other main forms of gameplay, these being skateboarding and cooking. Skateboarding plays out much like you would expect it to, although it cannot help but feel a bit rough around the edges. Each of the terrain elements around the map that let you perform special actions such as rails to grind, walls to run on, or wires to zipline down have a weird snappiness to them that is difficult to get used to at first. While this does make traversing around the map much easier, it can also make racking up high combos either awkward when expecting to snap onto a terrain element and not, or unrewarding as you don’t need to worry about smacking into obstacles as much.

Lastly, there are not a lot of options in terms of performing tricks to get a higher combo multiplier. While on a terrain element, moving in any of the four cardinal directions counts as a trick and you have the option to modify them by pressing another button. Beyond that and being able to perform manuals and wheelies, there are no other options. Overall this makes getting high combos while skateboarding feel like a bit of an afterthought, with more focus being placed on just traversal and looking more stylish as it is fairly easy to get satisfying combos.

While not many options for scoring high combos, there are plenty of smaller challenges.

As for cooking, it is much more similar to combat. There is an approval meter and a heat meter, both of which go up from performing QTEs. The goal is to increase approval, while heat can be spent to get more approval by either performing a harder set of QTEs, complimenting the sous chef, or channeling your ancestral roots to cook well. What makes cooking fun is the tension that slowly builds up over the course of each recipe from the subtext in the conversation Jala has with her parents. In many ways cooking boils down to being the same therapy that Jala gets from fighting her exes, just in a way where you are not beating up your parents for obvious reasons. Just like when fighting her exes, the absurdity does not stop for cooking either. Cooking a good meal will have your parents happy, but cooking a great meal will help them reach food enlightenment.

Sometimes you just make such a good Katte Sambol that eating it is enough to reach nirvana.

Other Allures

In addition to its strong visual design, the other main allure of Thirsty Suitors is its story. While every character appears to just be a caricature of a stereotype, over the course of the game they are all fleshed out and become more human than I would ever expect. We are left in the blind on why everyone in the town acts a certain way towards us, and piecing together the bits and pieces to construct the narrative is just as satisfying as finally apologizing for the past misdemeanors that Jala has made and mending relationships. It is the type of story best experienced first hand and blind, so I will refrain from talking about it much more.

Another detail that would be a shame to not address is the humor. While not the sort of humor for everyone, the overall goofiness of the art style persists throughout every aspect of the game. One of the very first characters you're able to interact with is a small dog named Manchan, whom you can break out a nine part secret handshake with. Over the years I’ve played several games that, described to another person will sound like a fever dream, and Thirsty Suitors is definitely one of those.

There are small details like Machan all over Timber Hills that make it feel much lived in.

Some Minor Gripes

That being said there are some minor gripes I have with the game beyond just the skating controls. Both of these gripes contain spoilers, so I’m going to be a bit vague as to not spoil. The largest gripe I have is with the B-plot. While incredibly symbolic for some of the larger themes that persist through the game, it ends so abruptly that it feels incredibly lackluster even though it does accomplish its purpose. The other gripe is just with the ending for the main plot. It slowly builds up tension for a big climatic event that just never happens as everything is resolved a couple days beforehand and it all just ends abruptly. Overall though all three of these issues are fairly easy to overlook as the game does such a solid job with its storytelling.

Wrap Up

Thirsty Suitors is a game that is unapologetically itself. In an industry where many game concepts are just rehashed over and over again, it is always nice to see a game take its own path and embrace its own silliness. Every single portion of the game is so incredibly dramatized that I cannot help but smile even for scenes I have seen several times over. However despite all the cartoon goofiness the game exudes out of every facet, Thirsty Suitors still does a great job of telling a grounded story about a bunch of flawed people and their desire to be accepted. While the price might be a bit high for some for a game that takes around 8-10 hours, and its name may cause some people on your friends list to ask what you're doing, I would highly recommend checking the game out.

Have you tried Thirsty Suitors? Did its story drag you in as much as it did for me? Did you feel like its silliness went a bit overboard? Let us know in the comments!