The Breakup Game

With kind and uplifting vibes, this game gently guides the player through emotional loss after a breakup, asking a series of questions about what happened and how they feel, while gently helping them to come to terms with things all the while.

I haven't been in a relationship or a breakup for quite a while, so I'm probably not the target audience for this game. Still, having had my own experiences in the somewhat distant past, I would hesitate to offer this game to someone who has really just experienced a breakup, as what they need will be a trusted person to talk to, and not an IF.

Still, this was still an uplifting and nice read, as the non-target audience of sorts. I also liked the choice of colors and the achievements, although these can quickly clutter your screen if you do not dismiss them. You could enjoy it for the pleasant feelings. However, in times of actual difficulty, it always helps to talk to a person you trust.

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.)