(This is not a post about Boyfriend Dungeon. It is just one of the first several images that popped up when I googled roguelike dating lol)
When I first opened Save the Date, I died within one minute. That was when I realized what the name actually means: this is not a traditional dating sim, but rather a disaster dating sim, in which you have to figure out how to literally save the date and your partner’s life. But as I played more and died more, I felt that this was a roguelike-ish dating sim. And such a combination brought interesting conversations to both genres.
Save the Date shares with roguelike its usage of replayability and death as a mechanic. In the first round of the 3 restaurants options, you will die very soon with no doubt and the system will bring you to restart the game. Replaying becomes a must-to-do move (otherwise the game is just over within one minute and seems kinda pointless). From previous playing experience, you get some new information and conversation option each time, which brings you new possibilities to “win” the game (although you will still die at the first several rounds). The idea in Save the Date is that you die to learn and win, which is one of the core mechanisms of roguelike games. The way Felicia died also seemed random and illogical. You think you can avoid peanut allergy and save her life this time, but a car crash or ninja fight happens, and it just comes out of nowhere—almost seems like it’s randomly generated and each time you will encounter an unknown enemy that makes all your previous effort futile—a roguelike-ish quality. Admittedly, Save the Date is not strictly roguelike in terms of having fully randomly generated chambers and enemies, as the ways of death are limited and predictable after enough rounds. But it has the potential to be developed into a full roguelike dating sim to some extent if you just arrange infinite combinations of stupid deaths. These settings reverse the tradition of dating sims of dating live person and irreversible choices (so that you need to consider carefully about what to say and whom to hang out with, etc.) and actually don’t make Save the Date a dating sim anymore, because it is in no way simulating an actual normal date, but rather just gamified a date for its own metanarrative purpose in a very explicit way.
And how does Save the Date inform us about the roguelike genre? In Save the Date, the game doesn’t give you an explicit win state. It encourages you as the player to create your own win state. To some extent, this is also the case in a roguelike. Although there seems to be a win state after you finish the round, the game is still essentially unwinnable because you only beat this one possibility and not others, and you can never beat every one of them because there is inherently an infinite number of possibilities. That’s also what makes roguelike games replayable and still fun even after you beat it already. You have to decide for yourself whether you have won or not, and whether you want to stop the game or not.
These comparisons lead me to think about these questions: do we play a game in order to win it/beat it or are there other purposes? How do you play a game if the game doesn’t tell you what to do and doesn’t give you a purpose? And if it is about deciding your own win state, then why bother playing the game (I guess in that case you can just tell yourself that you won, hooray)?
I hadn’t put a lot of thought into this game being a rogue-like. You make a great point about how the game uses death and replay-ability as a mechanic, especially with the peanut allergy and telling Felicia that she should move a few feet to the left as an example. But you’re also right that its fundamentally different because your actions do not matter nearly as much as they do in other rogue likes, since dying 100s of times does not at all make you better at the game. It only makes you and more aware that there’s nothing you can do to “win” the game. The sense of knowing that there’s nothing that you as the player are doing wrong helps a bit, and makes it fundamentally different than others games. Whenever I put down a game because I thought I would never be able to beat it, I always feel as sense of defeat. However I did not feel defeat when I stopped playing Save the Date. I wonder what that says about win states and whether they have to exist in a game.
This game definitely frustrated me a bit, mostly because it would have been so satisfying to find that one sequence of choices that would perfectly save Felicia’s life. I wished for a win-state. But your comment made me realize that this type of frustration this game makes me feel is very different from the frustration I feel with other games when they are difficult. There is something much more light-hearted about this frustration, more as if the game (or rather the developers) were teasing me. This makes me feel like regardless of whether there is a win-state, this game “succeeds.”
Pretty sure the previous comments covered a lot of my thoughts, but this is a really interesting take! It’s always fun to consider which games are “technically” roguelikes, depending on how you define them. Save the Date does have a similarly frustrating (and somewhat addictive) gameplay loop, though I do think its ability to build endings based on previous endings you’ve encountered deviates from the usual “complete restart” in the most traditional roguelikes. Granted, Hades and many other roguelites do treat dying as a way to progress the story, so it isn’t too unusual.
(Sidenote: I do think Boyfriend Dungeon would’ve been interesting to mention, since I think it could count as the middle ground between Save the Date and a “traditional” roguelike!)