There’s a lot to like about Hatoful Boyfriend ––the couple of hours I’ve spent in the PigeoNation were both jocular and surprisingly affecting––but it’s hard not to think about what it could have been. Hatoful Boyfriend could have been that game, but it’s not, which makes it emotionally familiar and conceptually inert. Whether there are thousands or just one, what does it mean that there is such a thing as a pigeon? Never comfort nor intimacy, but estrangement made bearable by curiosity and wonder. It would wonder what a life connected to alien beings, animal, object, or otherwise, would feel like. This game would plumb the unthinkable question of what it’s like to be anything that’s not yourself. Such a game would have less in common with the dating simulators Hatoful Boyfriend ultimately fails to lampoon, and more in common with David O’Reilly’s Mountain. Instead, it would be a game that forces us to ask ourselves if and how one might learn to love a being utterly unlike one’s self. Under these terms, Hatoful Boyfriend wouldn’t be a game about a world in which we humans can take pigeons as our lovers. But what if a game didn’t simply assume that that such connections were the goal of having relationships with other beings? Indeed, what if the game didn’t assume that such connections were even possible, but instead probed the depths of their possibility? In videogames, love is often a goal, if not an achievement in the literal sense. The game offers little insight into the love we feel, or don’t, for other humans, but even less about what it would be like to love a bird (or to have a bird love you). Written differently, Hatoful Boyfriend could have disguised a deeper inquiry into the very nature of love. It didn’t have to be this way, of course. Underneath its avian gimmick, Hatoful Boyfriend just another dating simulator. PigeoNation’s not as birds, but as the (human) personalities they parody, the experiential weirdness starts to deflate like an aging balloon and the game becomes the very thing it was intended to parody. At precisely the moment you begin to think of the birds of St. It’s not hard to pinpoint when this happens. Perhaps it’s not surprising, then, that the novelty of Hatoful Boyfriend begins to wear off rather quickly. Underneath its avian gimmick, Hatoful Boyfriend just another dating simulator.
In other words, these birds don’t experience themselves as birds, but something more like humans in a birds’ bodies. The game offers little backstory, but a little online research reveals that a vaccine intended to inoculate humans from-what else-bird flu had the unintended side effect of giving birds mental capabilities, both intellectually and emotionally, equal to our own. PigeoNation’s Institute are explicitly human in their intelligence. Hatoful Boyfriend makes it clear that the birds of St.
Between looking for a summer job, dealing with social climbers, and managing competing affections, the whole experience actually comes off, however improbably, as fairly mundane. Anyone who has graduated high school can attest to the kinds of activities Hatoful Boyfriend asks you partake in. PigeoNation Institute, are, ironically, rather human in their scope. The kinds of interactions you have with the two-dozen or so birds you meet at St. There might be more weirdness than the average game has, but it’s not exactly different weirdness.
#Hatoful boyfriend human mode simulator#
What other word do we have to describe an interspecies dating simulator in which you, a human, navigate the pitfalls of secondary education while simultaneously pursuing a fledgling romance with your choice of bird? What sense of normalcy could ever account for being propositioned by an elegant, sweet-talkin’, sugar-daddy parakeet? What could be more bizarre than you or I, walking arm-in-wing with a fantail pigeon, locked in the triumphant sashay of love?Īnd yet, the weirdest thing about Hatoful Boyfriend is that it’s not actually that “weird” at all.
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