Thirsty Suitors Review: Reconciling Past Romantic Loss with a Limited Moveset

Jala Jayaratne hasn’t been back home in ages. She stopped calling her stern Indian mother and even her warm Sri Lankan father, and she certainly hasn’t been kept in the loop that her sister is about to get hitched. But after Jala splits with her girlfriend, she finds herself headed for Timber Hills, the hometown that will serve as the stage for the events of Thirsty Suitors. Armed with little more than her bag, skateboard, and portable tape player, Jala must face all the emotional turmoil in her personal life—and mainly through turn-based RPG battles.

Reminiscent of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Jala’s main conflicts are with her exes, starting with a grade-school boyfriend and extending all the way to Tyler, the trans woman with whom she had a fiery on-again, off-again romance during their high school years. Every fight in Thirsty Suitors is full of over-the-top animations, and the boss battles take place against psychic backdrops involving things like deadly giant pastries and a house cat that morphs into his feral jungle equivalent. The flamboyant conflicts are a pointed contrast to the more grounded emotions at the story’s center, as conversations between Jala and her exes play out between attacks, revealing what transpired and why they’ve carried around such pain for so long.

Though perhaps a bit over-reliant on a snarky narrator who serves as a figment of Jala’s imagination, the game’s writing is often quite good when it comes to creating a rich and tumultuous history for the characters. Thirsty Suitors foregrounds authentic emotions with remarkable ease, and it’s confident enough to let its protagonist remain bracingly imperfect. For one, she has a voice of her own, and doesn’t serve as a blandly sympathetic blank slate.

That emotional complexity, though, never quite gels with the game’s mechanics. Regardless of what the characters say in between their attacks, the player is still embroiled in a standard RPG battle to be won or lost. It’s a brute-force conflict that maps poorly onto the range of emotion and reaction that might arise from two people having a difficult conversation, as we’re steamrolling their grievances, wearing down their health until Jala can reconcile with them. The relationships are further flattened by just how quickly the conflicts resolve. As soon as an ex shows up, you fight them and then they become a supplier of sidequests once you prevail. And with one small exception, everything gets funneled to the same destination.

Perhaps if Thirsty Suitors had narrowed its focus to fewer exes across more drawn-out conflicts, the reconciliations would have carried more emotional weight. But the simplistic battle system barely supports the game as it is, requiring little variation in attacks or strategies. Where other RPGs have party members or classes or equipment, Thirsty Suitors has little more than Jala and her limited moveset. Every fight runs through the same motions, where you guess at the right status effect to inflict on an opponent and then perform the move to exploit their weakness. Things rarely get more cerebral than remembering how far you need to scroll down the skill list.

The success of each move is affected by quick-time events, but even this novelty quickly wears off because they’re featured everywhere you look. They’re present in a dancing minigame, in interactions with certain objects, and especially in the cooking segments with Jala’s mother that provide items for use in battle. The only place they aren’t especially prevalent is in the game’s skateboarding navigation, which isn’t much more complex than the battle system but is satisfying enough to enliven your movement across each area.

Yet Thirty Suitors makes only sparing use of the skateboarding score system or the accompanying platforming challenges, even during the ex-focused sidequests. The narrative that accompanies the skating, about a cult of teens following a man in a bear mascot outfit, is threaded through the game’s main story, and while it’s hardly without its charms, it concludes rather abruptly, and with only tangential effect on Jala’s more personal plight.

That’s how so much of Thirsty Suitors feels to play: stylish to look at and perhaps pleasurable in the moment yet ultimately quite shallow. As a whole, it’s a bundle of middling mechanics carried by strong writing. The story may be about Jala coming to terms with her past while she figures herself out, but the game itself never settles on a cohesive vision of what it should be.

This game was reviewed with code purchased by the reviewer.