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banahna--games · 7 years

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Recently, I’ve purchased and have been playing “Dream Daddy”, a daddy dating simulator. The game was created by the Game Grumps, and hasn’t even been released for a month, yet. The game is available for purchase on Steam, and can be run on any PC platform that allows for you to run steam games.

The game starts off with a black screen, and your character is being woken up. You get three dialogue options right off the bat, one of them being an extremely cute exchange between you and your daughter, Amanda, where you learn a little bit about their relationship right off the bat. You get to create your very own “Dadsona” before you begin the main story of the game. The quick start of creating your character, and going through the choices you get while you look at pictures, really draws you straight into the game. It’s giving the player something to connect to, and makes you invested almost immediately in the life that you’ve lived with your “family”. I also personally thought that choosing the gender of your spouse, and if your daughter was adopted or not, was a really sweet move on part of the game. It gives the player a customizable story, and because you chose it, it gives it a lot more meaning.

(https://i.neoseeker.com/p/583/54/dream_daddy_a_dad_dating_simulator_image_kgNyZ.jpg)

The story begins when you and your daughter are moving out of your house after the death of your spouse, and in anticipation of Amanda going away to college. You move into a cul-de-sac, where in every house around you there are other eligible dads! Well, with the exception of Joseph. After meeting the different dads that you can romance, and making a “Dad-Book” (which is basically a grinder for dads), you get to choose which route you want to begin. Like most dating simulators, you get a different story depending on which route you decide to take, as every romancable character has a unique backstory and chain of events that you experience with them.

(screen shot taken from my own game)

The game was better than I honestly thought it would be. There were more dad jokes, so bad that they were all phenomenal, and all of the mechanics of the game work really well together. The art is all really well done, colorful and cheerful while not being too childish. All of the menus are easy to use, simple and easy on the eyes, and the soundtrack fits the game so well. Almost every second of the game has a background of what can only be described as “dad music”, the tunes only second in soothingly lazy to Elevator Music. There aren’t many controls, as everything is just a simple click of dialogue, or the occasional timed click of a mini-game. However, this is very common when it comes to visual novels and dating sims.

(https://s3.amazonaws.com/indieobscura-www/assets/editorial/2017/07/Dream-daddy-damien-ending-date-01.jpg)

Everything about the game was really cohesive. From the art to the music to the small lines that the characters might speak, really all worked well together. There was nothing about the experience of the game that felt off, or inorganic. It allowed for a smooth emersion, and a very enjoyable marathon.

The different routes for the different dads are, of course, subjective. But each dad has his own unique personality, and the stories that go along with that gives each dad a different level of character, so that none of them are strict stereotypes. They’re all (with the exception of Joseph) very lovable characters that the writers did a fantastic job keeping them with their very own personalities and depth. Each dad had an enjoyable story to play through, and I didn’t find any of them lacking.

My only qualm with this game, which you may have realized throughout this review, is with the character of Joseph. Joseph is one of the dads that you can date, but he’s married with four children. You meet his wife Mary at a dive bar, if the player decides to go out to the bar that first night, where she asks you to buy her a drink. Thinking she’s a very flirty woman, the player can chose to buy her a drink or not, but she ends up walking away in either case. It makes for some very awkward encounters, especially as the player continues on and tries to break up her marriage.

Joseph comes across, first, as a very christian man. The “cool youth minister” he calls himself. However, the more you learn about Joseph the more… skeptical you become of him. He talks about leaving his family behind and going to “Margarita Ville” a fictional place in a Jimmy Buffet song. When you go on his third date, you find out that he’s slept with Robert, and cheated on Mary. There’s not only all of this, but it is impossible to get a good ending with him. You either stay as his “Mistress” while he’s with Mary, or he leaves you to work on his marriage to her. There’s no winning his route.

(https://thumbs.mic.com/MGI3MzZmNjI0ZCMvQzFGN0Jlc1FZV056ZHE1M2RZNHNnaTRzeDBzPS8yMDR4MTY4OjI2ODJ4MTU2MS84MDB4NDUwL2ZpbHRlcnM6Zm9ybWF0KGpwZWcpOnF1YWxpdHkoODApL2h0dHBzOi8vczMuYW1hem9uYXdzLmNvbS9wb2xpY3ltaWMtaW1hZ2VzL2lxYTZmZ2d6N2dkcWRnbGM1cHNhZzhvbW53NDdpNXVoZHh5N2QxZ2NwN3ljeTJzdTNodWZia3p3c3UyZ2d3cHAuanBn.jpg)

However, this is only the surface of the issue. There’s clues throughout the entire game that point to a much more sinister piece. I won’t go into every detail that I can pick out, but the overall effect is that Joseph is head of an evil cult. There’s a locked level that the game has no trigger for yet, which is possibly because of the rushed release date and minor bugs. However, there is an achievement for completing the secret level, called “Escape Margarita Zone”. An ominous achievement that no one has actually been able to get. People have extracted the hidden level onto different platforms in order to play through it, and I’ll provide a link for you if you want to watch that video. It will definitely show how crucial to the entire story this one, unlock able level actually is. ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aNjX--zXBlE )

I don’t like Joseph. I don’t like his character, I don’t like the way that he’s written or behaves, and I don’t like this cult thing. It’s a really interesting idea, and if it had been written into everything better I would have loved it. But, it isn’t. There’s a very select number of things that actually tie into this idea that Joseph is running this cult, and while they’re extremely prominent, you have to go on specific dates and chose specific dialogue in order to find them. If something this major was going on in the cul-de-sac, an underlaying preset for the entirety of the game, I want it to come up in more routes. I would like to have seen it incorporated into everything, since it’s actually a huge part of the story, and makes a lot of sense when you tie the pieces together. It’s the idea of Joseph, and how poorly it was executed, that bothers me more than anything. And even then, it isn’t a bad execution, as it simply is no where near as wonderful as the rest of the game.

All in all, Dream Daddy is a wonderful dating sim that I think is something that should definitely be given a chance. Joseph just sucks.

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