![]() The juxtaposition of birds as high school students also inspires some peculiar questions: Why does a school of birds have a club devoted to… birdwatching? How exactly would a human and a bird participate in a three-legged race together during a sports festival? Why do the birds have cell phones if they don’t have opposable thumbs? But most of all, why is a school and city populated entirely by birds full of buildings, vehicles and other infrastructure designed specifically for humans? A “hunter-gatherer” comment here, a back-handed compliment about your simian ancestry there. But this changes too the feeling that you are something other creeps up slowly, through countless tiny microaggressions scattered throughout the game. So when you start to experience feelings towards a bird, do you start imagining them as a human, as the portraits suggest? Or after seeing nothing but pigeons and for hours on ends, do you imagine yourself as a bird? And what would that mean?Īlthough you’re introduced as the sole human at your school, the first-person view of the game occasionally makes it easy to forget that you're different from everyone else. Human beings tend to be a bit narcissistic by nature when we look at the world around us, we want to see ourselves in everything from animal behavior to inanimate objects. The power of games often lies in their ability to project us into the bodies of others, and playing Hatoful Boyfriend can create an odd sort of tension about exactly who you think you are when you’re romancing sentient birds. The fact that you are looking at a picture of a bird ceases to matter or rather, it starts to mean something else. If you don’t feel entirely comfortable thinking “I’d hit that” while looking at a digitized image of a pigeon, then this may be the option for you.īut the more time you spend forging connections with the beady-eyed bird boys at your high school, the more you start to genuinely feel for them as they share their stories of familial conflict, profound loss-and yes, even love. When you begin the game, you’re given an option to toggle on humanized portraits of each bird that appear the first time you meet them-essentially, anthropomorphic training wheels that make it easier to project sadness, longing, malice and romantic interest onto pictures of birds. I was particularly amused by Okosan, an academically-challenged track star on a quest to find the ultimate pudding (and whose human portrait is inexplicably just a bird in a suit).īut keep playing, and Hatoful Boyfriend slowly becomes something more: an exercise in empathy. Avian puns abound, and while I could do without the seemingly My Little Pony-inspired pronoun “everybirdie,” there's a lot of hilarity to be found in substituting pigeons for people. If you’re considering buying the game for the sheer weirdness factor, go for it: the writing is both clever and absurd enough to justify the price of entry. ![]() The longer you play, the more you realize that the game is a bit of a Trojan horse: a seemingly ludicrous joke that slowly unfolds into something more affecting that it has any right to be, and then peels back yet another layer to become something far, far weirder than the idea of dating birds. ![]() (Or as one Steam review put it, “easily the best pigeon dating sim out there.”)īut resist that temptation, for the birds of Hatoful Boyfriend are not what they seem. If you’ve never played the game-which recently got a high-definition remake by Mediatonic and a release on Steam-it’s tempting to dismiss it as a one-off gag. Much like Goat Simulator before it, Hatoful Boyfriend started as a joke-a parody of dating sims whipped up for April Fools’ Day in 2011 by a manga creator who happened to be fond of pigeons. Pigeonation high school, a girl who has to select her love interest from the usual panoply of boy-band archetypes: the shy nerd, the jock, the smooth talker, or even-gasp-the teacher. You play as the one and only human student at the elite St. The concept behind Hatoful Boyfriend is simple, but incredibly bizarre: it’s a bird dating sim. ![]() But here I was anyway, getting legitimately choked up over whether or not a quail was ever going to love again. The catch, of course, is that he wasn’t a “guy” at all he was a bird. At one point during the dating simulation game Hatoful Boyfriend, I found myself walking through a park with the guy I had a crush on as he confessed his profound grief over a lost love-how her absence had broken something deep in his heart that he might never be able to put back together.
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