Mediatonic, PC/Mac, £7
Let’s get something out of the way first: Hatoful Boyfriend is, indeed, a Japanese pigeon dating simulator. It is a game in which you romance pigeons. You, the central character, are not a pigeon – you are a girl, who is embarking on her second year at St Pigeonation’s Academy for Gifted Students, and every other student there is a bird.
It is not, crucially, a pigeon hentai game. This is not some grubby filthware, filled with lascivious coos and wandering wings, but an exploration of teenage romance – being unsure of each other’s desires, unable to read each other, and navigating the treacherous social minefield that is high school.
But with pigeons. I should underline that fact – everyone else is a bird.
The game does not let you forget this; it is not simply some dating sim where the devs have changed all the human boys to pigeon boys, say. Their limitations are well-known and often referenced. For instance, your homeroom teacher Mr Kazumaki is a quail, and he is worried that he will fly directly upwards into the ceiling when he is scared because that is what quails do.
Hatoful Boyfriend, in true dating-sim tradition, is primarily text-based with still images of characters and backdrops flashing up behind; you click through paragraphs, make choices at certain junctures, and see how those play out.
Will you, for example, choose to join the student council in an attempt to get closer to the dashing and noble (but terribly entitled) Sakuya? Will you train hard in gym to draw the attention of Okosan, the hyperactive track star? Will you investigate the tremendously creepy goings-on in the infirmary to shed light on Doctor Shuu, who is – and I do not say this lightly – the shiftiest-looking partridge I’ve ever seen?
The characters – who, again, I must stress, are all talking birds – are weirdly well-developed, in a high-camp sort of way. There is something more to be found underneath the surface of every single one of them, and it doesn’t take much to bring it out of them; this is a kind game, mechanically, and it’s not keen on punishing you for actions you didn’t know you were taking unlike many other dating/choose-your-own adventure games I’ve played in the past.
It is also a game that you must play more than once – around ten times, in fact – because there is a vast amount of story to be uncovered here. The fact that everyone is a talking bird and that you are the only human student is addressed only briefly in the initial playthroughs; there is an incredible sense of wrongness that bleeds throughout the whole thing. Why, for example, does our heroine live in a cave? Why, on her late-evening jog through the city, are there vistas of ruined skyscrapers, reams of empty streets? How did birds learn to cohabit with humans and, most importantly, how did they learn to speak?
I’m reminded of Assassin’s Creed 2, of all things; Ezio could find glyphs hidden in the world that unlocked puzzles, and from that, exciting footage of stuff that was pretty crucial to a backstory that was – right up until Assassin’s Creed 3 turned up – fascinatingly strange. It broke up the weirdness behind the game (that humanity was overseen by mysterious alien creatures that we once worshipped as gods, and now that somehow feeds into Non-Stop Parkour) into bite-sized lumps, and it was a wonderful rabbit-hole to throw yourself down.
Hatoful Boyfriend does the same; there are conspiracies at work, and things that are being left unsaid, and they are so vital to understanding what the hell is going on that I searched for them as hard as I could while - and this is important - going on dates with a rock dove.
I wasn’t kidding when I said that you should play it ten times because (and I’m doing my best to avoid spoilers here) once you uncover some of the mysterious events going on in the school and the puzzle has just started to piece itself together, you are offered a ridiculous, over-the-top, three-hour-mega-adventure that bundles everything together in a package so large and unruly it hurt my head trying to take it in.
Simply put, Hatoful Boyfriend is surprising; it is both so much more than a game about trying to start a life with a sickly rock dove, but at the same time, it makes the act of trying to start a life with a sickly rock dove both interesting and entertaining.
You know how, even if you don’t like watching football, you can probably still enjoy a quick game or two on Fifa – but if you don’t like trains, you definitely won’t enjoy tooling around in Train Simulator 2014 for an afternoon? Hatoful Boyfriend is the Fifa of pigeon romance and you should buy it for that reason alone. It is a very clever, very charming thing.
