Every ritual in Sucker for Love: First Date is a contract I know I should stop signing. The instructions are sitting right there in the Necronomicon. The consequences are rarely subtle. The protagonist understands that he is dealing with beings capable of ending civilization, yet the promise of one kiss is apparently enough reason to keep turning the page. That stupidity is the joke, but the game works because it eventually makes following the instructions feel genuinely dangerous.
The unnamed protagonist begins with exactly the wrong personality for Lovecraftian horror. Instead of recoiling from forbidden knowledge, he has spent years chasing it. When a bright pink Necronomicon finally gives him a ritual he can understand, he performs it and summons Ln’eta, an unmistakably Cthulhu-like woman who responds to his obsession with an offer: complete several rituals for her and she will kiss him.
Actually carrying those rituals out is where First Date stops being a visual novel with a funny premise and becomes something stranger. The book gives specific requirements, and I have to prepare the room accordingly, manipulate objects, speak incantations, and follow instructions in the correct order. Completing enough of Ln’eta’s requests fills the three-heart smooch meter, turning cosmic horror into the world’s worst courtship checklist.
That physical involvement matters because mistakes are mine. Reading that a ritual is unsafe is one thing. Moving too quickly, preparing something incorrectly, or ignoring an instruction and immediately discovering what I have done is much more effective. One mistake sent the tone from cute flirting to disturbing imagery so abruptly that I stopped treating the book like a joke afterward.
The game never abandons the joke, either. That balance is its strongest trick. Ln’eta can be affectionate and adorable while casually asking for acts that should terrify any reasonable person. The protagonist can recognize obvious danger and still decide that danger is acceptable if there is a kiss at the end. Sucker for Love understands that the comedy becomes better when the horror remains legitimate rather than revealing that none of it really matters.
Estir pushes that contradiction further. She carries herself with the arrogance appropriate for an eldritch royal and expects rituals to be performed with considerably more ceremony. Her chapter changes the rhythm because courting her feels less like indulging an affectionate monster and more like navigating someone who expects devotion as a baseline. Kayli Mills sells that superiority particularly well, including dialogue elaborate enough that simply hearing Estir deliver it becomes part of the joke.
The third chapter complicates everything again rather than merely introducing another date. Nyanlathotep brings a different energy to the cast, voiced by Lani Minella, while Michaela Laws gives Ln’eta enough sweetness and menace that neither side feels like an act. All three dateable characters are fully voiced, while the protagonist remains silent, which keeps the game’s strange women dominating every scene exactly as they should.
The three-chapter structure prevents any one version of the joke from exhausting itself. Each section changes what the protagonist wants, what the rituals demand, and how much control he actually has over the consequences. Choices lead toward different endings, so curiosity naturally becomes dangerous again once I start wondering what happens if I knowingly disobey the sensible option.
That was enough to make me replay sections rather than treating the first ending I reached as definitive. The game is short, but branching works in its favor because experimentation fits the protagonist’s personality. When the central character is already reckless enough to perform occult rituals for romance, deliberately checking the obviously terrible alternative barely feels out of character.
The visual direction makes those experiments harder to predict. Most scenes look like a lost 1990s anime dating game, with bright character art, expressive faces, and enough sweetness to make the interface itself feel harmless. Then something goes wrong. The same aesthetic can suddenly support warped bodies, unsettling faces, blood, or a jump scare without changing into a completely different game. The horror feels like corruption spreading through something cute rather than a separate mode switched on for dramatic scenes.
xtraspicy’s music follows the same logic. Romantic and comedic material can feel playfully exaggerated, while later cues let the supernatural threat take over without losing the strange anime identity underneath. The soundtrack does not need to convince me that the premise is serious. It needs to keep the game suspended between ridiculous and threatening, and it does.
First Date was built in GameMaker by Akabaka and released on Windows in January 2022, followed by Nintendo Switch that December. The compact scope suits the idea. A longer game could easily have flattened the ritual gimmick through repetition, while these three chapters keep finding new ways to make me reconsider whether one more page of the Necronomicon is worth opening.
The protagonist, naturally, never develops that instinct. That might be what I like most about him. Cosmic horror usually depends on humans discovering that they are insignificant before incomprehensible forces. Here, one spectacularly determined idiot sees those forces clearly and remains focused on getting a date.
Verdict
Sucker for Love: First Date makes performing the ritual more important than simply choosing dialogue, which gives its horror-comedy real bite. The three voiced eldritch dates are funny without making their danger meaningless, and every bad instruction I willingly followed made the next one harder to trust. Short as it is, the joke never wears out before the horror catches up.
