How Dare You

How Dare You? has a cringeworthy premise: you show up at the home of our partner, Heron, who communicates very clearly that it’s over and you should leave. Yet…

…No, you can’t. You’ve got to convince em to change eir mind. You just have to show em how much ey means to you. How much you care.

You refuse to leave. The game requires you to try to win Heron over. It won’t let you leave prior to making some sufficiently dramatic gesture (and it’s a parser game, so you don’t know the options).

From the opening, we get strong hints that Heron had good reason to call it quits, and this is borne out by the options available to us, our internal dialogue about the situation, and Heron’s reactions.

If this were a romcom, you could probably turn things around: an egregious disregard for boundaries at the final act climax is always a winning move. But this was written for the Love/Violence Jam and the Anti-Romance Jam 2024.

The cringeyness of the premise and ugliness of the situation is redeemed in that it does end badly. The story doesn’t sugar-coat toxic behavior and pretend it’s sweet: it recognizes the toxicity, which is refreshing.

It’s an extremely quick bite-sized story and worth a few play-throughs.