Update Twenty-Eight: 29 July 2017

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Dream Daddy: a Dad Dating Simulator is the latest weird indie steam-popular game. A lot of youtube let’s-players are talking about it, it’s on the front page of steam, and it’s gotten a lot of buzz. That’s because it’s really, really, REALLY good.

It’s cute. It’s so cute. It’s so so so so cute and it fills a niche in the VN/dating sim genre. See, there ARE boy’s romance VNs, but the target audience isn’t usually for mlm* - it’s more commonly straight girls. Like any media that’s about one group of people but for another, it can be really kind of weird, fetish-y, and have a uncomfortable voyeuristic gaze. Dream Daddy was made specifically for mlm, though of course everyone can enjoy it. The humor is fresh, quick, and well written (though only time will tell how it ages, it works great in the moment) and the individual stories for each of the dads are heartwarming. It’s high-quality romance, period.

You play a dad, which you can make and name in a little dollmaker minigame, raising a high school senior, your daughter Amanda. You’re moving across town and into a house on a cul-de-sac that just happens to be FULL of eligible other dads for you to get to know, befriend, and eventually fall for. There’s seven dads in total, and a wide gamut of personality types are included. I honestly can’t pick my favorite - their stories are all really sweet and heartwarming. Each time I played a new route, I ended up feeling like ‘oh, THIS is my favorite dad’, only to be proven wrong by the next. For those of you wary at anything explicit, this is as soft-core as they come. There are some quick descriptions of some nice make-outs, and it cuts to black before clothes come off.

There’s not a lot of plot per se in the game, and there’s not much more I actually want to say because the joy is in the playing. It has OODLES of emotional intimacy between you and your chosen daddy, and the relationship between your dad and Amanda is fantastic. I certainly did not have a good relationship with my dad, and most of my peers that I know are similar. If more dads were like the dads in this game, I think the world would be a better place. This is idealized, feel-good fiction at its pinnacle, and if you were wondering if this was just a dumb fad thing, I’m more than happy to tell you that it’s not, and to give it a try.

That’s not to say this game is perfect, however. This is the first release of a small team, and there are a decent amount of problems. Three achievements are bugged, there are still some typos, sometimes choices don’t carry over correctly and sometimes sprites ‘get stuck’ on screen. This game is made in Unity, not a more traditional VN engine like Ren’py, so it runs like a dinosaur and lacks a lot of the standard quality of life settings in VNs like a log function or a skip read text function. Because it’s in Unity, however, there are minigames included. They’re… okay. They don’t bring a LOT to the game, and feel more like a gimmick. I’d rather have had it be in a more standard VN engine, but that’s just me. There’s also partial voice acting which I think is pretty superfluous - just a bunch of ‘reactions’ like ‘ah!’ ‘oh’ ‘hmmm’ that play over every line and end up just being meaningless and repetitive.

Overall, though, this is nothing a patch or two won’t fix. I’m shelving this for now and I’ll definitely revisit when that patch comes out, ready to dream about my daddies once again. Oh, also the theme song has been stuck in my head for four billion years. It’s so good. So cute. Just like this game.

Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator has been added to my Visual Novel Masterpost

Next up: Something’s not right in this aquarium. Time to die a lot in -

See you soon!

*mlm is an acronym of ‘men loving man’ or ‘men loving men’. It’s an inclusive way of talking about, literally, men who love other men. Gay, bi, pan, and other identities are included in the term. The equivalent term for women is ‘wlw’ or ‘women loving woman’.