Boyfriend Dungeon
Many years ago, back in the 80s and 90s, much of my free time was spent on single-player computer games. They rivaled reading as my favorite pastime. As the web rose, I spent less time on them. Most of my game-playing switched to games I played with friends. Occasionally, I’d immerse myself in new iterations of Civilization, but my biggest solo gameplay activity in the last few years has been phone games: Pokemon GO!, Love Nikki and Time Princess. (These are all online-only games with a slight multiplayer component, but the vast majority of gameplay is solo.)
But I kept thinking “single-player games are fun!” To the degree that, when a KS for a neat computer game would come to my attention, I sometimes backed it. By July 2021, I had backed 4 different video games, 3 of which had delivered between 1 and 8 years previously, and none of which had I played, or even installed.
(I have a terrible record of making use of anything I back on Kickstarter, but that’s another entry.)
On August 10, the fourth game delivered: Boyfriend Dungeon. I was actually still looking forward to playing Boyfriend Dungeon. A few days later, I not only fetched the Steam key reserved for me, but I added it to my Steam account, installed the game, and then -- amazing! -- I started playing it.
Boyfriend Dungeon is a dating sim crossed with a dungeon stomp. You play as an individual who’s never dated before. You are visiting Verona Beach for the summer, where you sublet an apartment from your cousin. A dungeon has recently taken over the local mall, and it happens that a bunch of people can turn into weapons. The hot new thing is to meet up with a weapon and then go into the dungeon with said weapon and fight monsters.
The game just rolls with its wild premise. “Sometimes people turn into weapons and sometimes your mall turns out to be a dungeon full of old communications tech that’s trying to kill you, you know, these things happen.” No, I don’t know, and these things do not happen, but I’m glad to see that we’re sidestepping the tropes of “pretending none of this is going on” or “the government intervenes to cordon off the dungeon-mall and puts all the weapon-people into testing facilities” or whatever.
The game has six weapon-people (three male, one female, two nonbinary) and one weapon-cat (male). There’s some diversity in races/origins here: one African-American, one immigrant from India, one Korean man, and three white people. They are all slender and conventionally attractive. As you fight in the dungeon with one of the weapons, you gain affection with that weapon. Each rank of affection unlocks an encounter/date with that person (or cat). It also unlocks a new ability or a new ability choice (choices of ability are easily altered if you change your mind later).
You choose your pronouns and your appearance at the start of the game, and can change either one at any time. The sprites are androgynous, and you can choose to wear any clothing options available; the appearance of clothing is not affected by the pronouns you choose. I liked these touches and thought they worked pretty well.
All of the weapon-people are protagonist-sexual, as it should be in any dating sim. You can play through the encounters as either romantic or friendly. The same character can max affection with all 6 weapon-people, and play through each encounter as romantic, or none of the encounters as romantic, or just one of them. It doesn’t seem to impact the storylines one way or another.
After you max affection with one weapon, you get a 2x bonus to affection with all other weapons, so that does have the nice effect of reducing grindiness.
I maxed affection with all seven weapons and finished the main storyline. Note: finishing the main storyline ends the game! I recommend either finishing everything you want to do before you start the final storyline encounter (it will be obvious when this will happen) or making a copy of your save file first (the game supports this).
I picked the romantic options when dating the six weapon-people, and the romantic options all imply sexual content, although they’re fade-to-black about it. I found five of the routes pretty satisfying, and the sixth one a bewildering choice for a dating sim. I didn’t explore any of the “let’s be friends” choices with the weapon-people. My impression from the reactions of those who did is that the dates work best as romantic-allosexual. There are no romantic-asexual options, and the friendship options are portrayed as positive but not with the same depth as the romantic-allosexual.
The weapon-cat encounters are pretty much “make friends with a cat”. I found the weapon-cat storyline endearing although I’m not sure why the devs thought this was a good storyline to put in a dating sim. I mean, he’s a cat. He doesn’t talk, he does not interact as a being of human intelligence, and you’re not dating him. I’m not saying I wouldn’t play a “befriend seven different cats with different feline personalities, each of them getting their own distinct storyline” game because I 1000% would. But it was an odd choice when everything else is dating (basically) humans.
The game has a content warning for stalking; I’ll get into this more in the spoilers section below. I have some spoilery issues with the main storyline as well.
I am not much into dungeon-stomps and it took me a while to get the hang of this one well enough to get through it. I ended up repeating a lot of the early levels in the first dungeon several times because it’s what I could handle. Once I figured it out, I think I was somewhat overleveled for the later stuff, so it was pretty easy thereafter.
The final storyline fight was difficult enough that after I beat it once, I reloaded and tried to beat it with a different weapon, and then nope’d out after a few failures.
There is a setting to give you double health or something on those lines; I didn’t have a hard enough time to turn it on. (Though maybe using it would let me beat the boss again with a different weapon). I didn’t see any other difficulty settings.
So I found the combat content a bit grindy and a bit challenging, but it wasn’t much of an issue. And I liked the little break between storyline encounters that stomping around the dungeon provided.
Overall, I had a great time with the game. I appreciated that it was polyam-friendly (if only in harem-style), bisexual-friendly, and had nonbinary rep for both the protag and the love interests. I enjoyed the romances, and I liked the setting and the tone: offbeat and with a sense of humor, but serious enough that I could immerse myself in the world. The main storyline disappointed me in some ways, but not enough to impair my enjoyment of the game.
On to the spoilers! This includes some stuff that I enjoyed figuring out on my own and am glad was not spoiled for me. It also includes details about the content warnings and specifics on what disappointed me. So YMMV on wanting to read it.
I want to point out that I enjoyed this game enough that writing this review makes me want to play through it again. XD According to Steam, I spent 15 hours playing it. I expect someone reasonably good at the dungeon stomp could get through all the content in 10 hours or less.
A little space for people who came to this via direct link and didn't get the cut-tag.
The Antagonists
The main storyline starts by mentioning that some person or group has been kidnapping and damaging weapon-people. (Over the course of the dungeon stomp, you find and rescue all of the kidnapped/damaged weapon people. The damage is minor and everyone heals fine.)
Early on, your cousin sets you up on your first date, with a swordsmith named Eric. Eric pretty quickly revealed himself to be a cretin. I was kind of “really? Dating this guy?” after the first date and then after he dissed my character’s cousin in text messaging afterwards, I went “Nope, hate him.”
By the time it’s confirmed that Eric is the kidnapper and that he’s been doing it to try to forge his own weapon-person that he can control, I’d pretty well guessed all this from the clues. It also turned out that he was stalking the MC, which did come as a surprise to me.
I was like “wait, what? He’s been stalking ME? We went on one date!” And then I went ... “oh yeah, that’s kind of how stalking works, isn’t it? Obsessive interest in someone who doesn’t return it at all.”
I found the stalking plotline creepy and well-done. The protagonist gets support from all their friends and it’s treated seriously, not as a joke.
At the end, you have to fight and destroy Katana, the weapon-person that Eric forged. Eric admits his wrongdoing, apologizes, and goes on to seek therapy. I found the “you have to destroy the weapon-person” part to be depressing and cruel. The weapon-person is made out of pieces of your friends/lovers, and they’re portrayed as at least somewhat sapient -- they can talk and understand speech. Killing them because Eric is a douchebag felt incredibly wrong. I realize that they were also murderous and stalking me, but the final fight is portrayed as “you set up a trap for Katana in order to kill them.” There is no possibility of reform for Katana, and the protagonists never try to envision such. I’d’ve felt better about it if, say, the trap had been intended to contain Katana but Katana escaped and you have to kill them to save yourself/your friends. Forcing me to treat Katana as a non-person in exactly the same way that the villain treated them as a non-person did not sit well with me at all.
I don’t mind that Eric goes off to therapy rather than to prison, but I would like to have seen Eric make restitution for his crimes. I mean, he kidnapped and injured five people and a cat, plus the stalking and the crafting of a Frankensteinien monster. Dude has some serious work to do and “go to therapy” is a good start but it doesn’t cover it.
Romance Options
The “romance turned weird” is the one with Sunder. Sunder is the face of Boyfriend Dungeon: an Indian man with wavy, shoulder-length hair and a trim beard and mustache. Over the course of his romance, you get warned off of him early on -- “he’s no good for you/he’s dangerous.” And then some clues that he’s a vampire, which had me going “what the heck” and then “well, this was already a paranormal fantasy with the people turning into weapons, so I guess vampires fit in?” And then on his last date, well after confirming that yup, he’s a vampire, he dumps you, no reason given.
I was one part “I didn’t want to date a vampire so okay” and one part “what was even the point of having this storyline in a dating sim? Why did you make the face of your game the vampire dude that dumps the MC?”
Isaac was easily my favorite dating plotline: he has the sweetest personality, a fantastic voice, and the most seductive demeanor. Sunder was the easiest weapon to fight with, for me, but I maxed Isaac first because he’s So Good.
Ending
No matter what you do, the game ends with you leaving Verona Beach to go home. And leave all your new friends and lovers behind. The general implication is that you’ll be back someday, or they’ll come join you, but there is no explicit “you stay with your lover(s) and live happily ever after”. This didn’t bother me too much -- I’ve been in a lot of long-distance relationships, and it’s not ideal but it can work fine and there’s no obstacle to your character coming back. But for some people, it broke the implicit “romance should promise an HEA/HFN” promise. Which Sunder’s plotline broke more explicitly.
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