The Breakup Game

This game has good styling and coding. I think the author will do well in the future. I believe this game was written with a specific objective, and that the author did well on that objective.

That said, I think the objective is a misstep.

This game is about break-ups, and it coaches you through overcoming it. It may be helpful to someone currently going through a breakup, but I found it very poor at talking with me about a breakup that I had long ago and had worked through.

There is a real tonal mismatch. When I got my third achievement pop-up for, I think, being sad, I just paused and stared at the screen for a while. It feels so odd to me to have positive, upbeat, awarding achievements while coaching someone through a breakup. I just can't see, say, my mom, putting gold stars on my shirt as I cry to her about a breakup.

The game assumes that you are right now in the depths of despair. Sometimes it gave way too many options to express myself (and allowed me to go back and add more before giving generic advice that revealed it didn't really care about what I chose), and sometimes it gave ones that don't at all reflect my thought process (like 'That's beautiful' and 'that's sad' as the only two reactions).

I think Chatgpt memes have ruined me. While I don't particularly suspect AI use here (it's possible but unimportant to me if it was used), there are a lot of memes about how AI has inordinately upbeat, generic and positive reactions to inappropriate things, like it's own mistakes. "You deleted the codebase!" "Oopsy! Hee hee. You're right. But we won't give up, because you, you are special, and we will get through this together!" While the branches of this game were selected by a human, they felt to me also to have some inappropriateness in tone at times, like asking for specific details and then completely ignoring them while giving us an achievement for being a true warrior.

I do not feel like this game is awful or should be mocked. There is a great difference between someone doing a poor job at creating a game and someone doing a great job at making a game I simply didn't like. This game has evidence of good craftmanship, but my personal, subjective reaction is that it didn't work well as a mirror of my own feelings or as a coach through hard times.

The game includes a lot of wise, well-regarded remarks on how to get through a breakup, and attempts to simulate the effect of a friend or therapist to help a you to feel seen and heard. It didn't do much for me, but it could help someone else.

I think the achievements were mostly distracting. They cluttered up the screen, forcing me to click on all of them to dismiss them and continue. There are so many, it felt like a parody of achievements, but, if it was a joke, I didn't find it funny, and if not, I'm not sure what the point of them was.

(One thing the game didn't consider: I'm still friends with the person I imagined for the purposes of this game.)

Last month my wife and I celebrated our ten-year wedding anniversary – it’s been an eventful decade, but still, it kinda snuck up on us! And we were together for a few years before we got married, so it’s a bit over thirteen years, all told. Before that, I was in another relationship that lasted for just about ten years, though it definitely had gone one past the point where it was good for either of us, so between that and the fact that that was breakup before my wife and I started seeing each other, I can’t say that I’m especially torn up about the way things ended. So doing the math, to get to the point in my life when breakups were a thing that caused existential-level angst and regret you need to rewind the clock just under a quarter-century – far enough back that I actually have some nostalgia for the crappy Star Wars movies and right-wing president that in retrospect were so much better than the ones we have now.

I’m not, like, incapable of empathy, though, so this quirk of biography doesn’t mean I automatically don’t vibe with stories about relationships ending tragically – far from it! But despite its name the Breakup Game isn’t actually a story like that. It’s not fiction at all, when you get down to it, more of a therapy-adjacent journaling tool that prompts you to reflect on a breakup and learn to feel better about it, with questions inviting you to characterize the other person, the ups and downs of the relationships, how you’re feeling now, and so on, with the game invariably responding with upbeat pep-talks (and even a cavalcade of achievements!) and before coming to close with a series of interactive affirmations.

It feels presumptuous to assess how well this would work for someone who’s in need of some help working through their feelings about the end of a relationship, since I’m so far removed from that situation. Still, I did make a sincere effort to call to mind the details of my most recent breakup and re-inhabit that mental space to the best of my ability as I navigated through the prompts. Personally I can’t say the game felt like it was a useful tool for engaging with my feelings, whether because they were too distant to access with the requisite immediacy or just because we were coming at things from a different angle. See, Breakup Game is written in a very positive way, with almost every sentence working to buck you up and help you move on. It also necessarily reaches for abstractions, because the choices it offers almost inevitably don’t allow a player to communicate much of the specificity of why a relationship was good, and what happened to bring it to an end. An extended excerpt gives a solid flavor of the thing:

"Ah. The void. Some try to ignore it while soldiering onwards. Others try and dull it with any means they find. There are those who try to fill it with other people entirely, only to discover their shape doesn’t quite fit, and that the void slowly leaks in through the gaps.

"Whatever your choices are in the events that follow in your life, know this:
It is you who will outlive the void. Not the other way around. Its size will shrink, its shape will lose its contour, and whether it disappears completely or finds a permanent home in your heart is not the point.

"The point is this: it will lose its relevance."

As slightly-New-Agey lectures about eventually you’ll be able to move on, it’s not bad, but I’m not sure how many people find that kind of approach convincing (it just puts me in mind of that Robyn song where she’s coming up with a vapid way for her new boy-toy to let down his soon-to-be-ex: “the only way your heart will mend/is when you learn to love again”, etc.)

The other place where I felt like the game’s assumptions deviated from my experience is how it treats feelings of regret. See, when I’ve had relationships fail, my negative feelings generally haven’t focused on missing the other person – there’s inevitably some of that, but things falling apart has tended to take most of the bloom off the rose – but rather been ones of guilt, berating myself for being selfish, thoughtless, a bad communicator, etc. Those are unpleasant things to think about, but there’s also a positive aspect to them too, as having made those mistakes and felt bad about them has helped me be at least less-bad with other partners. But the Breakup Game doesn’t have any truck with the idea that you should stew over your mistakes:

"Whether it was your best or your worst is meaningless. The way you tried was the only way you could have. Learn from it, but leave your blame behind you."

Game, I was raised Catholic, that’s just not how we do things.

This is all a long-winded way of saying that the Breakup Game isn’t for me in the slightest. That’s certainly fine – the nature of the Comp is that games with more idiosyncratic target audiences get played by people they aren’t intended for, and while I think I have fairly ecumenical tastes, those certainly have their limits (see also: all my recent review of anime-ish games). I do think there’s probably a version of this game that could have broader appeal by trying to offer a wider but also more specific range of choices to allow the player to see their circumstances more clearly in the mirror the game offers; making the prose more grounded would probably also help on that front.

But that might not be a tradeoff worth making, as it could risk the game not working as well for the people it does speak to (a cool feature I haven’t mentioned is that after playing, you can submit your own note for future players, and reading the couple that had been posted as of this writing, it’s clear some folks have vibed with the current approach). In other words: it’s not you, it’s me, I think we’ll both be happier if we see other people.