I played Speed Dating for Ghosts and so should you

This is a game review of Speed Dating for Ghosts by Copychaser Games. It contains spoilers that will be marked with "spoilers start here" and "spoilers end here." Don't read those chunks if you don't want parts of the story spoiled!

Speed Dating for Ghosts is cute, kinda funny, kinda spooky, and definitely worth your time. I've never played a dating sim before and I don't think I'll play any others in my life, but this one is an exception.

I paid around $2 for this game since I got it on sale and I played it on the Nintendo Switch. It's so cute that when I say "I played it," I mean I played 2/3 of it once because I want to save the last third and any replays for a day when I need a pick-me-up. It's just that good and wholesome.

It plays exactly like it seems it would. You're a ghost, though you never make or see your avatar, it's actually you playing the ghost, and you're looking for love. Or a connection. Or, sometimes, something else entirely (see the spoiler section for more details). You chose a room to sit in and you meet three different ghosts in that room. You get to chat with each of them twice before choosing one to go on a date with.

The art is simple, the concept is simple, the dialogue is simple. What more could you want? It's at once cozy and funny.

I watched out for any content warnings while I was playing and so far, while it does constantly talk about death, I couldn't find anything else potentially triggering in the game. There are two, spoiler-y exceptions, clearly marked below, that may not fall in your traditional content warnings, but I felt like mentioning them (do a search for "CW" if you want to be taken directly to them).

SPOILERS START HERE:

Are you sure you want the spoilers? Okay, then keep reading...

Here's the CW: One character has anxiety attacks and severe anxiety. It's a major plot point for them, but you can chose to interact with them less. Another character battled cancer. Again, you don't need to interact with them much, but if this is a touchy subject, there's no good way to avoid walking into it without doing more research.

Now skip the rest of this if you don't want spoilers!

The characters I encountered were all really well thought out. They had their own quirks and some of them even managed to be annoying, which was, well, annoying.

Sometimes I didn't like the dialogue options I was presented with, such as the responses to being asked to rob a bank with one of the characters. I was simply uninterested in their plotline and wanted to walk away, so to speak. Instead I had to decide whether to get to know them, whether to help them, whether to turn them in, or whether to be snarky about the whole thing. I simply wasn't interested and none of the options reflected that. Or if they did, they felt very circular in nature.

The Lady in Smoke, however, had my heart from the beginning. Needless to say, I chose her in the end <3 She was so sweet and funny and had an interesting back story to round out her character.

At the end of every room/level, you choose one character to go on a date with. I thought this choice would be meaningless and would just get marked in the system somewhere as "You chose Kyo," but no, you actually go on a date with them. And yes, I did choose Kyo, and yes, I was worried about offending them and scaring them off the entire time I was with them. It was all worth it to learn a little bit more of their life before death, though.

I also love that this game makes no assumptions about its players. One of the characters told me I was pretty spooky looking and another one called me "sunshine" when she first met me. I interacted with ghosts of different genders and never did the game make me set a preference for the types of ghosts I'd like to see. I like this. The only improvement I could suggest here is including the ghosts' pronouns at some point during the interaction as I'd like to refer to each of them correctly.

I won't talk much about the other characters I saw because you really should just go experience them. You may even find small pieces of yourself in the writing...

The spoilers end here, but if your eyes tend to wander, here's a buffer line to prevent you from seeing something you don't want to.

Now back to the spoiler-free content.

SPOILERS END HERE

The one and probably only thing I didn't like about this game was the haptic feedback, which I imagine I can turn off. My controller would rumble at odd times and make me question what was being said in a weird way. I could have done without it and will look into turning it off next time I play.

I mentioned this in the spoiler section, but the non-spoiler version is this: this game is (at least from what I've seen) LGBTQ+ friendly.

If you like story-driven games, play this. It's like a bunch of little stories you can slowly uncover over multiple playthroughs. There's no puzzling, no moving characters, no hard decisions to be made. You just need to select responses in conversations (and it's much easier than having a conversation in real life, I promise).

Speed Dating for Ghosts is the perfect game to play with the controller in one hand and a cup of tea in the other. Somehow wholesome and sad and spooky and funny all wrapped up in one. Make sure you're comfy and settle in.

All that said, it's not like, the best game ever. It probably has a little over an hour of total play time, not including however many times you replay it to see all the branching paths (which I am going to do). It's a simple game to pick up for an evening and I think could even be fun to stream with a small group of friends. It's not ground breaking, it just is what it is.

I rate this game a 7/10 and would recommend it.