Hatoful Boyfriend, a deeply weird yet touching visual novel where you date birds, has just come out for PlayStation 4 and its attendant handheld, the Vita, so it’s a good time for us to recommend it. As I write this, there is a virulent thrumming, like a sick animal growl, coming from our windowsill: It is the persistent, almost threatening coo of a local city pigeon who has decided our bird feeder is now its territory. I’m going to just go ahead and suggest you play the pigeon dating game.
If you want to know more about it, last year Laura wrote about Hatoful Boyfriend for Rock Paper Shotgun, and without spoiling anything she digs into the genuinely-subversive elements of the game, aspects that have fun at the expense of the visual novel format, its tropes and conventions. Just when you think you have mastered all the conceits of bird-dating, something unexpected happens.
If you don’t have a PlayStation platform you can check out Hatoful Boyfriend on Steam, and you can get a free demo here.
That pigeon is still outside. It is starting to frighten me. This isn’t a joke.