#pockedate

i suppose, if you're asking, then it only makes sense to say that they are - because if i tried to draw a line and say visual novels aren't games, i would be left with a whole bunch of questions about what is a game. visual novels often have gameplay sections, even notoriously hard ones; video games often have sections where you're kind of just reading text and occasionally making dialogue choices. how does one draw the line between a VN with gameplay sections and a point-and-click game with more focus on story than gameplay? isn't a VN kind of just a point-and-click game where the things you point and click on are dialogue options?

it's hopeless. the lines are too fuzzy. i play VNs and games on the same platforms, so they might as well be the same category, because they can kind of move between each other at will and my choose-your-own-adventure book from Target is never going to suddenly turn into bullet hell on me. drawing lines in the sand around such similar mediums is hopeless, drawing lines based on genre even moreso, and ultimately none of the lines are real. you can put the literary technique of foreshadowing in your video game review, you can put an insane difficulty spike in your visual novel, genres are fake and so is gender

PockeDate! is, on the surface, a cute visual novel dating sim in which you take your cute and slightly generic girlfriend Akari on various dates. of course, there are just a few hints on the store page that maybe there's more to this game... a conspicuous "psychological horror" tag on a cute exterior, and a vague content warning that seems to not so much warn people as much as it subtly advertises, "hey! there's something here that requires a warning!". i think i've seen this film before.

i was a little offput by the advertising and premise, initially - not because i dislike the premise, but because it's so similar to a certain other game. i've seen games that actively credited Doki Doki Literature Club that took less obvious inspiration, and as far as surface looks go, the game doesn't seem to even do much to set itself apart. you go in not sure if this is going to be "DDLC with a TWIST" or just "DDLC, except someone else made it".

the thing i eventually learned, though, is that it's not just DDLC. i found myself saying "close enough, welcome back (insert title here)" a lot during my playthrough of this game. is there a quote about how the way to be creative is just to plagiarise from so many different sources that eventually you end up with a unique hodgepodge? pockedate certainly brings such a quote to mind. the game may initially seem like a DDLC clone but after playing through the whole thing, you get the sense that seeming-like-a-clone is just what this game does when it takes inspiration - because, in the vaguest and most spoiler-free way possible, the climax of this game has about as many conspicuous similarities to another famous game as the advertising has conspicuous similarities to DDLC.

i suppose the logical conclusion to come to is that it's intentional. the shoutouts are intentional, the game is supposed to be a bit of a nostalgiafest for a specific audience and thus it's supposed to seem like a rip-off. i find pockedate to be a fascinating case study in the post-DDLC era of Cute Psychological Horror. pockedate can't truly lull you into a false sense of security like DDLC tried to, because cute anime girls haven't meant "security" in the psychological horror tag since 2017, so it doesn't try; it doesn't waste your time with intricate character arcs and a slow-burn on the horror. it knows its audience, and it gets right into why you're here.

on that note, the game knows what you're trying to do. it can take advantage of its meta format. your time isn't wasted with complex choices that cause your route to be basically random without a guide; it's easy to max out your relationship, or to plummet it on purpose, because there's an immediate onscreen indicator of whether your choice was good or bad every time, and it won't take long to memorize all of the right answers, because you will be seeing the right answers again. there are only about 5 different dates you can take Akari on, and each location has mostly the same dialogue; there are some dialogue paths that seem to be chosen randomly but these, too, will start noticeably looping before long.

it's repetitive; of course it is. you're not here for the dates. the repetitive mechanic does actually add to the environment of a repetitive, stagnant world, on top of making it easier to get your desired outcome. interestingly, the game seems to somewhat disincentivise the obvious choice of deliberately plummeting your relationship in order to see the horror. this process is deliberately tedious, as akari repeatedly manually re-raises your relationship health bar. at the end of the process, akari does finally offer you the Lore that you're presumably seeking - but choosing to take her up on the offer doesn't make much obvious progress*, only briefly breaks the game before allowing it to start again, and then future lore reveals will call into question if she's even a reliable narrator here.

*unlocking akari's lore monologue does result in you getting one of the endings. this game has 6 endings, on paper, but none of those "official" endings actually end the game; you continue playing pretty much immediately after each one, and some endings have to happen immediately after other endings. it gives the idea that the "endings" the game keeps track of are just another form of achievement, and that the "true ending" is the one that ends with the game in a permanently unplayable state

the choice of whether to get the Lore Monologue is not something i see a lot in games, especially in the context of the more "correct" choice seemingly being no. it's not the only choice of that type. obviously, you know from the start that the cute innocent world presented in this game is a farce. essentially every ending in this game, including the unofficial "true ending", revolves around the player choice of whether they're going to play along with the farce or call it out.

pockedate is a game that continually turns to the player and, in essence, says: you are trapped. you hate your girlfriend, but you have nobody else. you are tired of always going on the same dates in the same places, but there is nowhere else to go. you are trapped in a claustrophobically limited world where nothing is real and nothing you do really matters. knowing this, will you cut yourself off from the things you hate, or will you stay with the things you have? will you repeat the loop forever, or will you take a leap into the unknown? is it possible to try and find meaning in a stagnant life? simply by including this theme it manages to feel far more like a resonant depiction of relationship problems, despite having none of the characterisation DDLC had.

the game does have lore, which slowly reveals itself toward the end. you certainly see more similarities to DDLC here, specifically the DLC, but you also see fascinating ideas that deliver more on concepts barely touched on in DDLC - and, crucially, this time it's free. the tragic thing is that nobody's really sure how to interpret the lore. there's no theories, no analysis videos, barely any fandom to speak of; there is a text file with an obvious coded message in the game and so far nobody has decoded it. there's a very unappreciated side of this game that, really, just needs more eyes on it, and a part of me wonders if the very clear surface similarities to DDLC were an attempt to get those eyes on it. if so, it may have had the opposite effect - DDLC has already been popular. the role of "viral horror game disguised as dating sim VN" has already been filled. what this game might need is to show what it does to set itself apart... that and a bigger advertising budget.

there's one other thing that bears mentioning: the difficulty spike is fucking vertical.

remember how i said every choice in the dates has a clear right answer? the right answer for the first question is that visual novels are games. this seems like a cute little meta thing - of course the VN girl wants to be respected as a Real Game Character - but i don't think it's actually that, because something not being a Real Video Game doesn't really have to mean it's bad. most people agree books aren't Real Video Games and yet billions of people read them. really, the reason the correct answer is considering visual novels as games is because, even if you love VNs for what they are, you are in for a rude awakening if you don't expect real gameplay here.

there is an intended workaround to make the climax reasonably beatable, and in fact once this mechanic activates it basically becomes easy, since after each failure you're continually given more boosts until you win. the issue is that this mechanic, for reasons unclear to me, only activates if the game detects that your Steam friends are online and active, which does feel a little like you're randomly punished for not having friends. listen, man, i first tried this part of the game on the deck sitting outside my staffroom, you're crazy if you think i'm putting my workplace's wifi password into the deck so that all my coworkers can see i need my steam friends to help me beat a visual novel.

this is also just a really baffling and out-of-left-field mechanic, and after a few deaths it gets trivially easy. i guess maybe that's the point, because the target audience of the Innocent VN probably doesn't want a very difficult final boss, but then why put in such a tough battle if the intended (and only possible) way through is to skip all of it? why have a climax where the difficult part is, specifically, getting all your friends online at once? if i was actively looking for ways to interpret this positively, i would suggest that the parallels between akari and real-world toxic relationships are intentional, and that you need the help of your friends to finally cut her off much like you often do in real relationships. i would also suggest that this theme needs to be clearer and more present throughout the rest of the game to justify it coming up in the end.

overall, i'm coming away from this game with the impression that it's from a game developer that could make something i consider mind-blowingly good - and this isn't it.

there's one other thing, which most certainly wasn't intentional but exists in the game. the dates get repetitive quickly, and after a few loops you don't really need to be able to read every word in the dialogue to get the gist. you're also able to change the game's language mid-way through after any date. this is rapidly approaching minecraft messenger turtles levels of "medieval creative workarounds to achieve a goal that can be done with software designed for it on the same platform", but there's absolutely nothing stopping you from using this game as a language learning tool to make the repeated dates a bit less tedious. i bring this up mainly because the game has a couple of language options that are hard to find in games. there is a part of me that can't help but interpret pockedate's whole existence as though the universe is finally apologizing for never making a proper ukrainian translation of DDLC.

the thing is that in the 2020s, psychological horror dating sims disguised as cute romance visual novels have big shoes to fill. i'm sure the dev behind this game knew they were not the first person to ask the question of "what if ddlc was good?". they might have even known they were not the first person to ask the question of "what if ddlc was ukrainian?", which i think is the next best thing for a ddlc-inspired game to be if it isn't going to be good. if this game turns out to be both of those things, i'll throw a party

i'm definitely enjoying it so far. the first bits of horror are quite good. they start quickly and the romance sections arent too fleshed out, but eh, we all know that's not what i'm here for. i'm waiting for the plot twist, because well, there's going to be a plot twist. i normally give tentative ratings when i first play a game, but if i try to do that this time i'm worried that it will age badly before the day is even over - it's apparently a short game and i have a feeling the ending is going to dictate my whole opinion.