ValiDate: Struggling Singles in your Area

Normally if I don't care for the narrative of a dating or visual novel game, but the game is playable, I don't post a review. That's just the sort of player I am. But there is a bare minimum acceptable functionality I expect in a dating sim (which should have similar functions to a good menu system). How you mess up a series of texts that pop up and menus I do not frankly know. But somehow they let this game get to Steam in this current state. Trying to back up or go to another menu involves clicking multiple times and praying that the menu actually takes you where you need to go. There was one section where I got in an infinite loop of "You take her." I thought it was a joke for a few seconds. It was not. And that's not even beginning to mention that there are some things they clearly forgot to proof edit, namely when the 'datable' npcs are looking at their phones, its clear they reversed the image without taking into account the text on their clothes. It's particularly obvious on Keaton. That isn't even going onto the fishing game. Why is there one in this game? What is the point? It would make sense if it unlocked alt outfits for the characters, or art, or something. At this time, I can't figure out what exactly is the point. And its bare bones too, so you can't really do much here except getting a trophy for it. I will add for the narrative I decided to go though, ooohhh booy who approved Malik? I don't think I could find a caricature that bad in the deep, deep 1920's south. Someone should've looked at that guy and give him a little more to do other than mixtapes, chip on his shoulder, and chicken management. The other person Inaya, could've been improved as far as personality, but its nothing compared to the walking disaster that is Malik. The two other people, from what I played of them, seemed reasonable considering their circumstances. You can't really play as any other characters (though their icons are still there, perhaps as some sort of DLC or something, I don't know) so the game lives or dies on if you like the characters you play as. I feel like most of the issues for the narrative is the fact with the name, valiDATE, you'd think you'd be able to form relationships with the cast, perhaps actually have a future with one of them (as your character of choice). Unfortunately, you see another person you may be interested, and then poof! Onto the next one. All that chemistry you may have developed? Doesn't matter you gotta go 'date' another person. Do you think that person better goes with someone else you played as? Doesn't matter you gotta get through them to get to the ending. It's less dating and more "therapy through a series of other people," which is fine if it was advertised as such. But the narrative wouldn't grind my gears so much if there wasn't an option to just skip to the route's end. How do you make a game, let alone a sim where the entire point is to get to the ending, and there is a auto complete function? It feels like they had no faith in their narrative. Which is ironic because of what the game is trying to be (diverse dating sim). I understand being a little unsure of a project, but it feels like they took it behind the shed without giving it a chance. And then, the function is messed up for one section of the game. Lovely. I'm not sure if this needed to be baked in the oven more and that's why it is the way it is, but maybe if DLC or an update comes out, it could be saved. But as it stands, I cannot recommend this game, or even have a neutral opinion on it.

I felt gross after playing this game for a couple of minutes. The beginning character, Malik, is honestly a horrible protagonist. Man makes me sick.

I am not sure how to feel about this game. Like many others, I followed this game for years when the development started. To have a game that strives to be different from its peers and go for real stories about black and brown people is admirable. I do hope from the release, more devs will take note and try to make something that’s out of the norm which is the white-centric sphere of the video game communities. I will address something about myself — I am not black, I am a brown Puerto Rican. I will not hesitate to be honest in this review but I do understand my place and certain aspects do not need to have my opinion, that’s for other reviewers who know and understand more to talk about. If so, I may make some mistakes and I am sorry if I do, and I’m open to omitting certain parts of this review if need be. Let me start with the technical side of the game — this game…does not function well. Even from opening the feels…unpolished. The transitions feel rough, clicking through text boxes feels sluggish and leaves the whole experience becoming a boring click-through, especially when you replay routes for different endings. Certain times, you can tell sprites weren’t properly cut, text goes fast but other times go flow. Speaking of the speed of the text, don’t go 100% if you can avoid it. The faster the text goes, the laggier it becomes and it looks disgusting to witness honestly. Again, the transitions feel rough, and once you start playing the game itself, it’s just too much. Too much of the story doesn’t need these transitions, they take you out of the experience and just make the pacing slow. Speaking of pacing, I do get the point of this game is you go back and explore the routes to get different routes, but I was honestly surprised to see this game has no auto skip, different checkpoints in important dialogue trees, or anything that would make the experience easier for the player. This feature should honestly be the first thing placed in a visual novel, and it’s baffling to me that no one on the programming team thought to implement this once the game was released. You do have the option to skip to which end you need, but it just unlocks it for you, not giving you the option to get the context of what leads to these endings. You can forgive many of the faults, but things involving the core gameplay cannot. If you are a lover of visual novels, you might want to avoid this game just for that reason alone. Bugs-wise, one of the major bugs I have encountered has reduced the enjoyment of this game by quite a lot. It was during Yolanda’s route in Inaya’s story. I kept trying to take half of the gummie near the end to get the good route, but the game kept thinking I took the whole gummie and kept giving the bad route. We had to give up at that point and just skip ahead to the good ending. I do hope the devs in some way fix this, not from me pointing it out but from someone else. This can be considered hard locking someone from the game, I’m just grateful for the ending skips are there to let me continue. Now, onto the writing and art direction. This is the big marking push this game relishes in, each character is written by a different person to tell their own story through these characters. Each character has their own set of real-life problems, problems that are in the focus that deter them from dating their dates, and just settle to be friends for now, and see what happens in the future. Now, I must ask you, is having different writers for each character a good thing? No, it’s not. At best, when Validate does explore these characters’ problems and their trauma in an honest, authentic way, it’s fantastic. Even the most dislikable character, Malik, his story is plagued with failures. His family for the most part wants nothing to do with him, and his mistakes and their mistakes keep haunting him, past, present, and potential future, if he doesn’t right his wrongs, and he doesn’t know how to. It’s hard to not relate to that. But at average, and at worst, this game is loaded with writing only chronically online people would love. And it’s about 80% of the game; the moment this game was released, it became dated. It is heartbreaking to find this game to be filled with memes, personalities you would only find on Twitter, and sentences you feel like you would find on their said Twitter. This game character’s age range is 22 — 28, but you can TELL this is written by people in their early to mid-20s that have been on the internet since the glory days of Tumblr. At times, I rolled my eyes when something like this occurred, other times I had to take a moment and just sit there and try to get through the route as best as I could. So far, I haven’t touched Isabelle’s routes. It pissed me off. If I wanted to see someone like her, I’d just follow fandom moms on Twitter and I’d get the same experience. This game unfortunately appeals to the lowest common denominator. It’s just like Borderlands all over again, trying to flood your character moments with memes that are no longer funny, and tweets that should’ve stayed on 2019 twitter where it belongs. As I said before, it dates your game and alienates future audiences that would love to have a game like this to play. To make a game, especially a dating sim, it needs to be grounded, it needs to be appealing to most, not just one group. Even games taken in modern settings can do this, you can get away with jokes but..this is just honestly embarrassing. And with the different writers, the writing can feel disjointed at times. Sometimes each writer has a different idea of the characters’ personalities. It’s like there was no real communication between the writers during the development of the game. Honestly, so far the characters that were saved from this were Emhari and Yolanda. Yolanda feels like a livable, real-life person in this world. The few times you get to see her in the other routes, she’s charming, she treats people with kindness and understands their problems, and tries to be there for them (Which, there’s a negative side to this, the routes she is in, she ends up feeling like the therapist date? While it’s good to have sequences of vulnerability, I wish Yolanda wasn’t used to being the vehicle for this). Back to praise, the art of the game is gorgeous, no ifs or buts about it. The artist is honestly the heart of this game. I don’t think it would be that eye-catching without her. Though, when it’s the kissing scenes, it seems like different characters are drawn. Not a problem, just something I noticed. Ultimately, I hesitate to recommend this game anyway. Writing is annoying, and embarrassing, with only one or two characters that have an authentic three-dimensional route it markets itself as. There are too many problems on the technical side, it’s just too hard to ignore. But, I do implore you to support the devs in any capacity. No matter how I feel about this game, the devs set out to make something different, and new, and for people who are in groups, who the gaming industry typically ignores. It’s admirable, and I will always sing praises to them for it. First games are always rough, and sometimes you can never get them right, but they deserve the support for trying something new and hopefully getting it right next time, once more of the episodes are released. In my interactions with this game, I will continue to support them as much as I can.

Struggling Singles in Your Area? Should be called Unlikable Individuals in Impossible Situations. I've played a shameful amount of dating sims and visual novels, and while ValiDATE isn't particularly poorly written, it is frustratingly one-dimensional. Maybe I would feel better about it if I had paid $4.99 instead of $14.99 but, to be honest, I think I'd still dislike it even if it were free-to-play.

I heard the game was racist, which I didn't believe. Got it on a sale. Conclusion: It is definitely racist - but the racism is coated by a veil of logical thought. The characters are flawed. You can sense that they have their own reasons for believing their ideologies. The game has a racist agenda. The views it holds on race speak of a disdain towards light-skinned people in general. The character Malik refers to himself as "A light-skinned disappointment." It's pretty well-written within the context, but the theme is clearly about fair skin being portrayed as a privilege, branding failure as a fair-skinned person as especially disappointing. Why is this game perpetuating social expectations based on race? "[Malik:] What if the white man decides to close the internet and everything we kept on it is gone?" - It's hilarious that my own character is racist. However, the passage is thought-provoking as it highlights the gigantic power that few corporations have the power to shut down your entire social circle on the internet. The only problem I have with this is the association with white people, as it's a clearly racist theme. "But, you can't go around blaming the white man for everything". In response, Malik says: "Are you one of those "white people aren't that bad" types?" "Haha what? No. I mean, not really." Great, the one sane character has to roll back on her statement. For one second, I thought the writing wasn't so racist. This game is racist with a twist, as it's definitely not what I was expecting. The writers have put in some thoughts to make every racist passage make sense. I hope that one day they become aware that antagonizing white people is not the way to go about for social harmony.

(long review, more in comments) I'm exactly the player this game seems to want (gay black person that plays VNs), so this isn't me saying this to be contrarian or controversial. I'll also say all this with the caveat that I've only played Malik's route and part of Isabelle's. I've never been more disappointed to be a game's target audience in my life. This game fails at just about everything it aims to achieve, and every part of a route that I clear leaves me sad that such nice art and designs are stuck in this terrible package. I streamed most of this to play through it with friends and we collectively found the experience almost nauseating in its ability to frustrate the player. Malik's full route left myself and everyone I streamed the game to so completely dissatisfied that it felt like it was poorly written as a purposeful jab instead of being the result of incompetent writing. TECHNICAL This game functions really poorly as a VN and I find it difficult to believe that any of the staff involved have played any VNs prior to creating this one. Moving to any section of the settings screen requires you wait through a one second long transitional animation. This animation (seemingly) cannot be disabled. There is no reason for it to exist, and it only serves to make navigating any part of the menu significantly more annoying. There is no quicksave option. Manual saving is very slow. This is very annoying. The text log requires enduring that transitional animation as well. It also frequently does not work. I frequently attempted to reference the text log only to have all the text crammed into one giant run-on paragraph in all lowercase. When it doesn't do that, the log stores very few lines of dialogue before cutting them off. The log itself is bizarrely laid out in a nice "aesthetic" fashion with text boxes and all per line of dialogue, which is incredibly annoying when trying to use a text log as a text log. The content warnings page has the unhelpful content warning of Homophobia?, which I've deduced means internalised homophobia. If you're going to bother with something like this in a game, be specific. There is a dedicated content warning for misogynoir, but none for misogyny, which is quite rampant in Malik's route. That misogyny was forgotten almost entirely when putting content warnings together beyond its intersectional application to black women is incredibly funny. Parts of dialogue are sometimes had through text conversations, where a phone screen appears and dialogue is shown as text messages. This frequently breaks. I've had to restart different routes multiple times because the phone screen UI change managed to break something about the dialogue. I didn't even notice that it had happened the first time it occurred until I realised they weren't meant to be repeating one line. This sort of glitch isn't only limited to UI changes; I ran into a dialogue loop in Isabelle's route with Ashlie twice. There is also no button to simply fast forward through dialogue, only the options to skip to the next dialogue branch choice or to skip to the end of the route entirely. Character portraits often don't illuminate to match the character speaking dialogue. They also flipped character portraits for when they're meant to be facing the character on the left, which is great, but they didn't bother flipping any of the patterns on clothing, meaning characters with text on shirts have the text backwards when they're on the right side of the screen, characters with jewellery on have the jewellery simply flip sides. The included rhythm game does not control well. It is a fun little detour in entertainment, but its introduction leaves players with more questions than answers (namely: why did it take until Malik's final date for players to get the chance to actually listen to his music?????), and you can't press multiple keys at once. Playing the rhythm game while in the middle of playing a date also results in crashing if you attempt to rewind to previous lines, view the text log, or perform various other actions once you've returned to the game. I think it causes some form of memory leak issue. WRITING I think that this game truly failed at the design stage. This game is built around the idea that you go on multiple dates with multiple different people as one character, with all those dates forming a linear narrative where you can see the character grow and change. In a better game where these individual character routes were actually long and better connected--formatted as one story instead of many dates--there would be time for these characters to grow on you, for you to discover actual depth to the character you're playing as, and for the relationships that they form to feel real. This does not happen in Malik's entire character route, does not happen in Isabelle's first two dates, and I cannot imagine it happening for anyone else. The short length (20 mins tops) of each individual "date", prologue and epilogue included, means that they can't get into any meaningful detail about who these characters are. Characters are written with Migratory Slash Fandom levels of overfamiliar, playful-mean banter after knowing each other for all of five seconds. Malik's date with Rocky highlights this, with both of them calling each other out on being ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ multiple times, yet they still stay in each others' company. For what? Why? I can't believe they would actually stick together were they not in ValiDate, because I know that ValiDate wants me to believe they wouldn't immediately walk out on each other after everything. Malik is compelling as a character. Or could be. You're meant to see him as a joke, and his routes are meant to be funny, but you're also meant to take him seriously. He's a pseudo-deadbeat but he loves his daughter but also he likes her more than his other child but also he's trying so hard. He loves his ex-partner and we're reminded of that constantly at the beginning of every date before she fades into the back of his mind--but wait, sometimes he thinks about how much he improved as a person in the time between the dates, so he has to think about her and how much he's improved. At the beginning of each subsequent date, especially as he interacts with more men, he goes over how much he's improved since the last one. He tells us this. We don't get to actually see him improve, we're just meant to believe him. So much tell, so little show. The writers don't actually have the skill or care to be able to write a character that's a real, actual piece of ♥♥♥♥ with nuance that ends up improving. They certainly haven't given themselves the time for it, given the length of each date and the total length of each character's story, but I don't think they would have been able to handle it even if they'd been given the time. They try to do this strange arc of him warming up to his own bisexuality, but because every character route is 30 minutes it looks like he just rapidly trips his way into homosexuality and then wakes up at the beginning of the next date like "well I'm totally over worrying about my sexuality :)" in a way that makes him seem at peace with it. All before he encounters another man and starts mentally going "I'm not gay" again. It feels like you're going in circles. A squandered opportunity: during Malik's final date, he gets an opportunity to text his sister while he's at a bar. In this text exchange, he mentions that he's seeing a man. Prior to and after this exchange, Malik flip flops on whether or not he's okay with being bisexual. With this background, you'd expect this sort of interaction to lead to some sort of interesting moment with his sister. Does he feel like he ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up mentioning that he's seeing a man? What will his sister think? Perhaps he's mentioned this to his sister before? Will she see this as a momentous occasion? Nothing. She hardly makes note of the guy's gender at all.

I like romance visual novels but this one is not romantic enough for me. It's just the modern dating game - you meet someone, go on a date with them, if it goes well you end up in the sheets. That's it. Cursing ain't cute and the characters here seem to do it a lot. Maybe I'm not coral and too old for this. The second character you unlock (Malik) made me quit halfway through his first route. No sympathies for him, all I saw was his bad side and him talking down to women. I don't think I'll pick this up again.

Game just wasn't for me. Nearly impossible to relate to characters and sprinkled with statements that left a bad taste in my mouth. Example - "Are you one of those "White people aren't that bad" types?"

If you're looking for a dating sim with some sweet romance then you might wanna skip this one as the story is linear and you just get flings, no sweet romantic endings or anything rewarding (unless you count unlocking a new character), just 3 different results depending on your choice on each date. Can agree with some reviews that some of the jokes in this VN are distasteful and well not streamer friendly unless you wanna accidentally drop the hard n word. (They have content warnings but not for racism/slurs??) I only played Malik's route but honestly I wasn't a fan it. I think the way this bicurious character was written was clumsy?? Especially when there was a guy who says they don't swing that way and yet Malik keeps insisting that they're eyeing him which was very uncomfortable to sit through. Gameplay wise, UI feels clunky at times for a VN. Don't bother using a controller as it's rough. There's also a rhythm game but as someone who plays rhythm games it feels awful to play which I know it's not the main part of the game but if you're going to have mini games at least make it feel smooth. Overall just skip this one, I wish I could like this VN more due to the game industry needing more PoC devs but it's poorly written and there's some gameplay issues that need to be fixed.

how the ♥♥♥♥ did they make a Visual Novel that controls badly. It is a glorified e-book. That is genuinely impressive. The text constantly bugs, there's a loading screen between every menu, and the menu is so unintuitive that I got stuck in a fishing minigame before actually playing the game.