Thirsty Suitors Review (Switch eShop)

If you play enough video games, you can see when developers are playing it safe, but that isn’t the case for Outerloop’s Thirsty Suitors. If anything, it is trying to do too much, its ambition reaching to heights that its budget simply can’t deliver, but we found ourselves not minding. So much love went into this game that even its flaws are endearing.

We all know that one friend who makes every relationship a bit messy. In the small town of Timber Hills, that person is Jala. She’s a first-rate skateboarder and heartbreaker, returning to her hometown after ruining yet another relationship. Waiting for her are her parents, her incredibly strong Auntie, and a host of scorned lovers looking to even the score. Jala isn’t returning home on great terms, but untangling the mess she made when she left is what makes the characters of Thirsty Suitors shine so brightly.

This game is steeped in South Asian-American culture, from the cooking minigames to the treacherous familial relationships. Jala’s mother is judgemental but protective. Her father is well-meaning and patient. Her sister is too focused on her wedding to try mending their fractured relationship. There is a wholesomeness to how this family squabbles but ultimately comes together. It is beyond refreshing to see the strained yet still positive family relationships depicted here.

The one thing that Thirsty Suitors nails is its style. Every action, whether it is petting a dog or returning home after a long day of skating/battling Jala’s jaded exes, is done with the maximum amount of flair. Even washing your hands before a cooking minigame involves a few flips and turns. Pulling something like this off requires a commitment to the bit – fortunately, the developers were fearless in their embrace of the Scott Pilgrim aesthetic that they were going for, making every scene a visual feast.

The turn-based combat is just as visually engaging as the cutscenes in Thirsty Suitors, but it is a touch shallow overall. Jala can inflict status ailments, such as Thirsty or Heartbroken, which allow her to deal extra damage with special attacks. Combat is riddled with Quick Time Events, which can increase the damage you deal or reduce the damage you take.

Each chapter features at least one boss fight, which follows the same mechanics but adds a healthy dose of banter between Jala and one of her jilted lovers. These battles take a bit longer to play out but don’t present much additional difficulty. We did almost no grinding against the waves of potential suitors Jala’s grandmother has sent from India to try to win her heart and still managed to win all the story battles without failing once. Anytime we got into a tight spot, we could just summon a giant version of Jala’s mother to smite our foes with generational guilt and a deadly slipper.

The cooking minigame and the skateboarding mechanics suffer from the same issue. Both look and feel great but the cooking mechanic uses the same Quick Time Event formula that the combat does while the skateboarding feels like a simplified Tony Hawk rip-off. Neither is polished enough to shine as much as the story or the characters.

Throughout Thirsty Suitors, you can feel Outerloop trying. The team is trying oh so hard, reaching for something epic and getting so close to perfection before its own ambition gets in the way. Between the combat, the cooking, and the skateboarding, there is one too many mechanics. If the team had dropped the skateboarding and focused on adding more depth to the other two aspects of the game, this could have been up there with the best indie titles the Switch has ever seen. As it is, it falls just short of greatness into the realm of good. Very good.

It is hard to fault the developers for their ambition, though, because they’ve still managed to give us one of the best stories we’ve seen all year. There is heart. There is humour. The broad spectrum of genders and sexuality are both presented in a positive, enriching way. The game is on the short side – you’ll probably be able to complete the main story within ten hours, though completing all the skateboarding challenges and side quests will likely take you a touch longer.

Its length might not feel substantial given the price, but it means the story is perfectly paced, with no padding or lulls. As much as we love being able to sink a few hundred hours into games like Tears of the Kingdom, it is wonderful to see a developer know how to keep things tight. There is just the right amount of game here.

There are a handful of small bugs to deal with post-launch, at least in the Switch release. Occasionally enemies will have the wrong voice for their model or Jala will get stuck behind a wall at the skatepark, but these are ultimately small issues that popped up during our time with the game

Outerloop comes just short of perfection with Thirsty Suitors, yet it still manages to create a great game that visually explodes with style in every encounter. Its greatest flaw is the developer’s sheer ambition – the addition of an unnecessary mechanic arguably prevented the team from perfecting the others. Whether through lack of time or budget, the devs haven't achieved the level of polish you would hoped for, but the characters and the story still make this an easy one to recommend.