Thirsty Suitors – tackling the subjects other games never do (Picture: Annapurna Interactive)

Battle to reconcile with your ex-lovers in this sharp, diverse hybrid of turn-based RPG, skateboarding game, and cooking sim.

If there’s one area where games have remained perpetually awkward for decades, it’s sex and relationships. Beyond a litany of horny visual novels, most mainstream titles sideline any question of romance as a broadly comical subplot or side quest, where the end result is some disjointed, pixelated fumbling or an embarrassed fade-to-black.

If a well-handled sex scene is a tall order, an emotionally mature exploration of romantic relationships feels like an impossibility. That makes the arrival of Thirsty Suitors – a sharp and witty tale of scorned exes through the lens of a South Asian family in America – feel miraculous in how well it skewers relatively complex relationship dynamics with a light, often surreal, touch.

The setup is partially a reverse spin on Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World. You play as Jala who, after a bad break-up, returns to her small town home of Timber Hills to reconcile with her parents and six exes, who all possess various hang-ups over the way they were treated years prior. This is played against the backdrop of an impending wedding for Jala’s sister Aruni, who also doubles as a sardonic narrator for Jala’s consciousness as she wrestles with her own mistakes.

You confront exes in turn-based psychodrama battles fuelled with magical realism. The first is Sergio, a ripped dance instructor loaded with flirty bravado who uses his machismo to hide his festering insecurities. Each ex has a weakness exposed through taunt moves, which make them vulnerable to type-specific attacks. Sergio’s weakness, for example, is his undying thirst for Jala, causing him to trip and miss attacks whenever Jala responds with anything mildly flirtatious.

While they play as traditional turn-based battles, with basic attacks, timed-button prompts for special skills, and dramatic Final Fantasy-sized summons, it’s all a surreal conceit for Jala and Sergio to air their grievances and work towards a resolution. As the battle progresses, the personal layers start to unfold through their back-and-forth chats between turns, which leads to a somewhat mutual understanding of where their insecurities are coming from.

It threatens to be preachy and moralistic but Thirsty Suitors is consistently funny and sharply observed, with narrator Aruni piercing your chosen replies for Jala just as much as her troubled exes. During thorny conversations with Jala’s parents, Aruni will call out your hypocrisy over a selected answer or push you to stand up for yourself if your mother steps out of line during a heated exchange. The dialogue you choose doesn’t affect the overall narrative, but it adds some agency and personalisation to the well-scripted conversations.

Along with being an inclusive and surprisingly mature dissection of relationships, Thirsty Suitors tackles these subjects in the context of a South Asian family wrestling with their own identity in another country. The attitudes of Jala’s Sri Lankan father to her bisexuality, along with his negative response to his queer sister coming out, is deftly covered in a heartfelt scene. An ex who originates from Africa, meanwhile, jumps between multiple versions of himself in battle, as he struggles to live up to his family’s expectations while living comfortably as non-binary.

Aspects of the family dynamic also drive comedy in the gameplay, with random battles across town presented as Jala fighting off potential suitors sent by her overbearing grandmother, while Jala’s mother can be summoned to serve a slap down with a chappal.

Along with turn-based battles, Thirsty Suitors is structured around two other gameplay styles. In a cooking mini-game you’re rated by your parents on how well you execute timed button prompt sequences and buffs between each step. These are often missions in the story, but they also give you food items to restore health or willpower points for special attacks in battle. Like this year’s Venba, these sections act as a showcase for various cultural delicacies too, giving you and idea of how to make the likes of Jalebis, Kathi Rolls, and Aasmi.

To be honest, the skateboarding is not a highlight (Picture: Annapurna Interactive)

The other gameplay element, and arguably the worst, is skateboarding. Your time in Thirsty Suitors is split over several days, across three key locations: Jala’s home, downtown, and a skate park run by a bear-masked cult leader who has managed to attract the adulation of disaffected teens. Aside from Jala’s home, you navigate these contained areas on your skateboard, where you can grind over parked cars and build up trick combos for the fun of it. If you want to dive further, there’s optional skate challenges too – ranging from collectable sprints to high score runs.

It’s all perfectly functional but, unlike the battles and cooking, it feels inessential. Thirsty Suitors excels when its gameplay is supported by the superb writing and personalities of its characters, a factor that’s missing when you’re simply skating around. As there’s only two areas to skate in, it all quickly becomes busywork in navigating to the next encounter with an ex.

The only other issue is that while the battles are the strongest part, the mechanics don’t really evolve after the opening hours. Between the turn-based fights and cooking, the majority of Thirsty Suitors is built on timed button sequences you often have to repeat for the same attacks.

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The presentation and different battle scenarios help stave off repetition but, over the course of 10 hours, some of the novelty dries up in the final third. It doesn’t help that the role-playing mechanics under the hood, where you place points into various traits, feel underbaked and superfluous to the overall experience.

Thirsty Suitors might be shallow in its systems, but it hangs together on the richness of its thoughtful, punchy writing. In a medium known for crafting stories around romance with all the subtlety of a pneumatic drill, it’s refreshing to see what’s possible when emotional intelligence and wit is wrapped into such a playful, funny, and progressive package.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), Xbox One, PlayStation 4, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £24.99
Publisher: Annapurna Interactive
Developer: Outerloop Games
Release Date: 2nd November 2023
Age Rating: 12

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Battle to reconcile with your ex-lovers in this sharp, diverse hybrid of turn-based RPG, skateboarding game, and cooking sim.