‘Boyfriend Dungeon’ Is The Dating Game That Lets You Have Sex With Your Sword

Boyfriend Dungeon is a dungeon crawler dating simulator video game that lets you fuck the very weapons you find and equip.

That’s right, currently, in the magically marvellous world of dating sims, you can smooch neighbourhood dads, pigeons in high school and monsters at prom, but now, as Junkee learned playing the game at E3, you can romance your sharp pointy blades, too. 

Finally, a game that truly lets me be horny on main. 

Part Smoocher, Part Explorer

As Kitfox Games’ community manager Victoria Tran explained to Junkee, Boyfriend Dungeon came about from the team’s love for dating sims, summer-fling nostalgia, those long school breaks during summer and magical girl anime. Their goal is to make a dating sim that looks more attractive to non-dating sim fans, breaking up the long chains of text and dialogue options with roguelike dungeon crawling.

The game begins just as you start your summer vacation. After countless bad dates and feeling unlucky in love, you decide to spend your summer with your cousin Jesse in the fictional sunny small town of Verona Beach in Southern California. In a fantastical future of the gig economy, people have turned to dungeon crawling and turning into weapons for a quick dollar, so you pick up a summer job clearing monsters in a series of dungeons called the dunj.

As you first enter, you discover a chest filled with rare loot. You open it to see a shiny crimson red talwar sword. Cool. Only it’s not *just* a sword, but Sunder, the beautifully long-haired bad boy and owner of the night club in town, who wants to whisk you away on a wild romantic goose chase around the city.

 

Boyfriend Dungeon combines everything you love about roguelike adventures and the charming characters and role-play of dating sims to set the scene for a cast of cool-looking edgy weapons and handsome babes. As Tran told Junkee, customisation and representing a multicultural and sexual variety of identities is important to Kitfox Games, so you’ll be able to make your own character, their gender and pronouns and none of those decisions will limit your choice of guys, gals and non-binary folk to romance.

And naturally, each weapon has its own personality, likes, dislikes, character arc and fighting style, and choosing which one to pursue romantically will determine the kind of story that’ll unfold.

Seven is a lasersaber and adorable K-Pop idol who wants to keep your relationship a secret from his high-maintenance agent and crazy fans, preferring to date someone he can play the guitar, watch horror movies and just chill with. Rowan is a magical scythe and non-binary plant-loving loner who struggles with the idea of dating another person, joined by a white raven perched on his shoulders designed by Hato Moa, the creator of Hatoful Boyfriend.

Oh, and then there’s Pocket, a pair of knuckle dusters that polymorph into an adorable sunbathing kitty who hates unrequited attention and other cats, but loves sunbeams, fish and boxes.

Because why the fuck not, I guess. 

is boyfriend dungeon out yet i wanna kiss some swords

— Arys Dungca🐥🔪 (@arystocracys) July 4, 2019

Just like any other life-sim, each day, you spend time exploring the town and its residents, do odd jobs, learn more about your hot weapons and go on dates with them at cafes, the beach, the mall and local gym, but also spend parts of your day exploring the dungeon and fending off monsters for some coin.

The town map and dunj is shown in an isometric polygon-shaped world with you as a giant chibi character like classic PS1 Japanese Role-Playing games, but cutscenes and dialogue are told in a crisp 2D drawn artstyle, with gorgeously animated magical girl transformations of your weapons turning into real hot people accompanied by a funky synthwave pop soundtrack. 

As you delve deeper into the dunj’s procedurally generated levels, you’ll fight bigger and badder enemies while getting closer to your pointy new boo, levelling up your weapons by strengthening your bonds with them on dates, much like Persona. 

Meet Isaac, My New Sword Boyfriend

In Junkee’s demo, we had the chance to meet Sunder, Isaac or Valeria. Before we could do anything however, we awoke to a flood of text messages from our Mum checking in on us, asking how Jesse is and giving us hope everything will be alright. 

Then, we got a call from our cousin, telling us about a dunj buried underneath the mall. Venturing out into the town map as a giant chibi model of our character in a tiny isometric polygon-shaped version of Verona Beach, we walked past cafes, the town hall and gym to the mall and made our way inside. Opening a chest at its entrance, we met the dashingly handsome and well-dressed Isaac, a polished and poised epee sword fit for fencing and kind-hearted and well-mannered young financier. 

A fan of haute cuisine, philosophy and meditation, and someone not looking for anyone who’s selfish and greedy, his dating profile reads: “Goodness, let’s get down to facts, shall we? I may be new to the dunj, but I know plenty about fencing. Hold onto me tightly, but not too tight. Deep breaths. Parry, then thrust. Practice makes perfect.”

Equipping him in battle, I felt like a trained competitive fencer, parrying and thrusting into enemies with a prickly poise, stunning and stabbing them in a flurry of beautifully shiny rhythmic dances that required a refined level of precision. As I took down rooms of gross tentacle creatures and critters, Isaac praised my fighting style and flinched when we were hit, the poor baby. Dodge rolling out of harm’s way, summoning giant fireballs at groups of enemies and with my charming new pointy love interest in my hand, I explored the dunj’s first few levels until I felt like it was time to get to know the real Isaac. 

By contrast, Valeria is a fancy decorated dagger who’s had many wielders, now living a life as a painter with a weirdly close relationship with someone she continues to tell you is “just an old friend.” She loves to travel, experience high art and scotch whiskey, and hates liars, cheats and ducks. She has a shorter damage radius than Isaac but omits a wider reach for fast-paced maneuvering combat, stabbing in rapid successions before dodge-rolling out of harm’s way and behind an enemy for a vicious backstab. 

The next morning, I got a call from Isaac asking if I was free. We spent the day getting to know each other, learning about his love for philosophy and meditation and why I came to Verona Beach, before we were interrupted by his overprotective demanding father. Looking down on me for not being of a high enough social status, I needed to win his trust and prove myself as worthy enough to date his son. Or as Isaac charmingly proposed, we could run away together into the sunset-touched dunj, to the tune of Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Run Away With Me,” no less. 

This was, of course, going quite fast and probably not how his story will unfold in the full game nor how my little heart could had anticipated, but was a nice slice of the playful concoction of roguelike mechanics and traditional dating sim storytelling conventions and themes in Boyfriend Dungeon. It’s a cute surprisingly touching game that tickles the absurd dating sim scratch that Hatoful Boyfriend, Dream Daddy and Monster Prom left behind, with added dungeon crawling gameplay that I hope develops further. 

If our short time with Boyfriend Dungeon tells us anything, it’s that we’ll probably be sobbing and pining over these pointy boys when the game comes out on PC sometime in the near future.

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Julian Rizzo-Smith is a freelance games and pop culture writer. After playing ‘Boyfriend Dungeon’, he wishes his own household objects would magically transform into hot dudes before him. He tweets @GayWeebDisaster.