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.