Thirsty Suitors Review: A Stylish South Asian Spin On Scott Pilgrim

Thirsty Suitors is a skating game. It’s a narrative game, weaving together an intricate and often explosive story of modern relationships. It’s a turn-based RPG. It’s a cooking game. It’s an exploration of clashing cultures, corrupt councils, and oppressive grandmas. Most of all, though, Thirsty Suitors is a game about love.

Don’t go into Thirsty Suitors expecting any semblance of realism. This is a maximalist game at a time when the industry shies away from anything over the top or not photorealistic. It’s brave to do so, as it is to weave so many genres and minigames into its narrative tapestry. Everything is here to serve the story that it wants to tell, but not everything is pulled off with the same level of precision.

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Jala has returned home to Timber Hills. She’s either going to apologise to or argue with her parents. She might be over her ex. No, the other one. She needs to get back in touch with her sister. For what reason? You decide. Jala’s character is malleable and every decision not only contributes to whether you play her as heartless or heartbroken, but also affects your stats as you pour points into three RPG options: Heartbreaker, Star, and Bohemian.

These only have a minor impact on your stats, but often dictate how you tackle any given conversation. If you’ve been burning your bridges (more than leaving town and ghosting your girlfriend already did, at least), you might opt for the most Heartbreaker dialogue choice in the future to stay true to your Jala. Be wary, though, as going all-in on one playstyle will affect both your conversations and the game’s ending.

One thing that’s non-negotiable about Jala is her heritage and sexuality. While you can choose which of her exes to reconnect with, flirt with, or push away entirely, she’s a confidently bisexual woman with a complicated history of relationships. Her suitors, some of whom are thirsty and others of whom shun her for past misdeeds encompass the entirety of the LGBTQ+ spectrum in a way that is completely normalised. No fanfare is made of the representation on show, this is just a world in which transitioning is as normal as skating around an abandoned theme park dressed as a bear. Which is to say that in Thirsty Suitors, no one bats an eyelid at either.

"Thirsty Suitors excels when it wraps a mechanic in a narrative thread."

Skating is a way to get around, to get from the diner, to the corner shop, to the abandoned theme park, and back home again for tea. You can grind benches and do some simple tricks but there’s not a lot to it. This is to make traversal more stylish rather than mechanically interesting.

The cult leader dressed as a bear who challenges you to skating challenges doesn’t want you to pop 720 Heelflip, he just wants you to grab as many collectibles as you can. Skating works better as a bit of fun than than it does as a mechanically deep challenge, and the same goes for other areas of the game.

Combat is turn-based, seeing you fight off random suitors your grandma has sent to wed you. Combine taunts with special moves to do massive damage, focusing on one emotional attack at a time. Inflicting your opponents with thirst makes them fall over themselves in a stupor, frustrating them makes them susceptible to higher damage, and summoning a giant vision of your mother to swat them with her slipper deals exactly the sort of embarrassment damage you’d expect.

While it’s fun and full-on, combat falls down in a couple of areas. Firstly, there’s no way to tell which emotional attacks each suitor is weak to without resorting to trial and error. Secondly, the attacks themselves vary in power depending on how well you do with a series of quick time events, which get very old quickly. You can toggle these in the menu, but the way the game defaults to being played is a little annoying.

The same QTEs plague the cooking minigame. To cook great dishes you must not only complete the steps, but impress your mother while doing so – something far easier said than done. There is fantastic narrative power in the minigame (which also provides tasty powerups in the form of traditional south Asian dishes) but the gameplay itself is lacking. While the QTEs loosely match the action Jala is doing, they often overlap each other to leave the screen cluttered and the player unsure of exactly which action to perform and in what order.

When battling and cooking carry narrative importance – cooking your dad’s favourite dish or fighting one of your exes, for example – the dialogue and high stakes carry it through. As with the rest of the game, story comes first, but it’s not enough to forgive all the downsides of the gameplay.

Thirsty Suitors excels when it wraps a mechanic in a narrative thread, but when the story takes a backseat, those minigames and combat interactions are left wanting. Everything is wonderfully presented in a fantastic maximalist style, from your parents tasting a perfectly-prepared meal in a flashback to their childhood to you front-flipping down the stairs and into your coat in one smooth action. A South Asian spin on Scott Pilgrim, Thirsty Suitors is a game that excels in excess, and falters when one or two of those layers are stripped back.

Thirsty Suitors

• Great story with compelling characters and meaningful decisions
• Well written and effortlessly funny in a way few games are
• Beautiful art direction and maximalist design philosophies

• Disparate minigames and mechanics falter when the story ebbs
• Overreliance on quick time events

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