Week of Love: Don’t Make Love (PC)

When it came time to pick a video game for the Valentine’s Day special, there were certainly plenty of candidates. The dating simulation genre alone is a well populated source to draw from and fits the day’s themes perfectly, but I decided to go for something a little more unexpected for this special day in the form of Don’t Make Love, a video game about two praying mantises trying to resist the temptation to mate.

Don’t Make Love involves two praying mantises having reached the point in their relationship where they wish to take things to the next level, but while those natural instincts are pushing them to further cement their love through intimacy, both of them fear what might happen next. The entire reason the game is titled Don’t Make Love has to do with the fact that some female mantids will devour the male after mating, and while it is not guaranteed that this will occur, the chance this may be the outcome of the relationship between two mantises with human-level intelligence leads to the game’s story. Choosing either a male or female, you’ll be speaking with your mate about the looming shadow of instinct potentially kicking in, your female mate worried she might not be able to control herself and your male mate concerned he might be eaten. However, no matter the gender of you mantis, it is clear the relationship has progressed to the point where mating is a huge consideration, although the player is dropped in right at the start of the conversation about potentially making love rather than seeing the building relationship before then.

Much of the conversation will cover things like the two mantises’ shared history up until then as well as your mate’s thoughts on whether or not they feel making love is worth the risk of losing their cherished relationship with you. The writing really isn’t too bad at making your mate feel like a proper character despite the only way to really get to know them is talking about such an intimate subject. Even the art can make these insects look rather cute at times, although there are very few images total over the course of the game. Still, despite some of the work put into presentation, the experience ends up feeling pretty rigid and limited when the player begins to interact with it.

In Don’t Make Love, the player’s influence on the plot is done by way of a text box they can fill in with anything they wish to type. The player does have a few preset options to pick beneath it though such as going for a hug or kiss or expressing an emotion purely through a facial expression, but you can’t go through the game just clicking the buttons and silently listening to your partner talk. As your partner speaks in small text boxes, you are given the option to reply, and that’s where the interesting angle for a game begins to lose some steam. Naturally, the ability to type anything means the game would have a monumental task of trying to interpret it all as if you were really speaking with another living thing, so it relies on a text parser that isn’t always up to the task. Besides your mate sometimes just continuing to speak as if you said nothing, other times it seems to get tripped up on sentences with a bit too much going on in them, encouraging you to use less syntax but also having your mate grow irritable if you are too monosyllabic. While sometimes your partner will just say they don’t understand to smooth over parsing errors, other times they’ll start to get angry with you, the game attempting to realistically respond to people typing in nonsense but sometimes catching legitimate attempts at talking in the same net. While the game does offer some options to just let your mate keep talking if they’re in the middle of a thought instead of trying to always enter a reply, this can lead to its own problems, as once, despite me typing in “continue”, the game’s suggested word if you want your mate to continue a thought, suddenly I was being scolded and my partner broke up with me.

Speaking of break ups, there are multiple outcomes in Don’t Make Love, although despite seeming to have many different subjects that can come up and plenty of achievements for different conversational routes, the conversations do feel pretty similar after a few runs even if you try to act very differently. Your partner has a tendency to course correct the conversation, but while keeping on subject isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the potentially heavy subject of making love isn’t really that hard to navigate as the player. If you think the mantises should take a chance, you won’t have to try too hard to convince your partner, and the same if you don’t want to mate or if you want the two to break up. While the first run through might give you some rather genuine sounding dialogue from your mate, it lacks the subtlety and nuance a real conversation about such a subject would have because you’re on one side not able to communicate well through the text box and the game-controlled mantis has only preset reactions and subjects.

If you let your partner speak, they tend to follow the same lines of thought as well, the same few beats usually being covered unless you find a small divergence. You can take control of the conversation at times with strong statements, but expect an “Anyway…” from your partner after the small detour so they can go back to where they were on their programmed path. Since you have to respond at least sometimes with substantial replies, it makes playing through to see the different paths a bit more tedious, the new conversational topics not really too interesting in themselves or that difficult to get. Your first playthrough is even a little plain, and while the argument could be made that this game might be meant for a single run despite offering plenty for people curious about what else can happen, it’s not really deeply emotional or particularly poignant. Your mate will talk about your relationship, their fears, mantis life, and sometimes spin a philosophical yarn about love or death, but you might as well be shaking your head yes or no to it all. It’s not the worst soliloquy ever, but this discussion of a heavy subject isn’t really dipping into groundbreaking territory as it struggles to integrate your part in its pre-planned courses. Giving you more rigid response choices the game could meaningfully reply to could have actually benefited things, since right now your partner will always have to pull from preset responses to try and deal with your infinite possibilities.

THE VERDICT: Don’t Make Love is an interesting experiment in text parsing presented through the unusual coat of paint that is two praying mantises talking about the risks and rewards of mating. It is quite the strange idea to be sure, but the actual content isn’t as involved as one might hope. The player has the freedom to enter whatever responses they wish in a text box, but the mantis they’re speaking to struggles to respond meaningfully and tries to stick to the script rather than convincingly reply to all but the simplest of inputs. It’s not really hard to push for the outcome you’re looking for save when the game completely messes up and misinterprets your intent, and the writing, while somewhat decent, isn’t really able to shine since it’s trying to weakly involve you in the conversation. A single playthrough isn’t too exciting, and trying to see other results just pulls back the curtain to reveal how rigid the conversation’s path truly is.

And so, I give Don’t Make Love for PC…

A BAD rating. Don’t Make Love is, to put it simply, just a curiosity. The story of two mantises discussing love and the openness of your inputs are meant to draw you in with their concepts, but underneath all that is just a struggling text parser supplemented by some cute mantis images. Your involvement is there mostly to encourage your mate’s continued monologuing, and besides the ultimate conclusion, you won’t have too much an impact on it save for outbursts that just lead to brief diversions or an instant break up. Capturing the complex intimacy of the subject and the additional gravity caused by the potential death of the male was going to be difficult to do well even in a game with more going for it, but the topic just isn’t really made more interesting through the player’s typed inputs, meaning that what work was put in stumbles to accommodate it or just outright ignores it.

Continuing to tinker with text parsing games will eventually put them on the level where they can potentially lead to deep and involved experiences like the developers of Don’t Make Love were likely hoping to achieve, but the state of this game is hurt by the limitations still present. The path of least resistance is too effective in a game that seemingly asks for involved or meaningful discussion, but then it can’t understand if you try and give it that and is forced to continue on as if you were a passive listener instead of an important half of the conversation. While Don’t Make Love could have achieved an emotionally moving experience had it been regimented instead of so freeform, perhaps more can be learned from its missteps. We may be missing out on a deeply engrossing game about mantis mating, but laying down the groundwork to help this game mechanic grow into something more may mean we’ll some day reach the point it can be done proper justice.