I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator (PC)

Advertising is all about getting eyes on the product, and nothing draws eye better than things that are out of the ordinary. The restaurant chain KFC was once known mostly for its jovial Colonel Sanders mascot, fried chicken, and a presence focusing on southern hospitality, but embracing the internet’s love of spreading the unusual, the company has certainly got more eyes on it with things like a comic book where the Colonel fights alongside Green Lantern and a game console that also fries chicken while you play. The absurdity only got more pronounced when, in 2019, a free game was released on Steam starring the Colonel not as an adventuring video game hero but an object of affection. I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator is the latest branch of this marketing concept and you can expect some scrumptious looking menu items presented along the way to get you hungry for some KFC, but a lot more work was put into the game to make it interesting beyond the peculiar premise.

In I Love You, Colonel Sanders!, the dating sim elements are all focused solely around trying to win the affections of a younger and more attractive version of the mustachioed southern gentleman KFC uses in its marketing. It usually isn’t too hard to pick up on the ways to please Colonel Sanders, but a wrong choice at points can lead to a game over that will lead to a retry of the current chapter of the story and your romantic pursuit of the Colonel can have different outcomes based on how you acted not only towards him but during other events in the game’s short story line. I Love You, Colonel Sanders! takes place at a cooking academy called the University of Cooking School: Academy for Learning which has only three days to its semesters, the game fast-tracking it story to get to the important moments rather than relying on a slow burn. However, this definitely benefits the game since instead of bogging things down with true dating sim elements like slowly winning someone’s affection, the game instead chooses to fully embrace the humorous ideas that brought you into the game in the first place and expand them beyond even just the concept of dating a fast food mascot.

Your character of no known appearance or gender is but one of many students taking the ridiculously small three day course on cooking. Both your classmates and your professor all bring some new strange idea to the table and have their personality traits dialed up to better fit them into this visual novel parody. The professor of the class is a talking dog who is knowledgeable in cooking but sometimes indulges in sillier canine antics so he’s never too dry and is often quite adorable, one of your fellow students Clank is actually a robot made out of kitchen hardware, and somehow a child named Pop seems to be attending class even though almost everything goes over his head. These unusual ideas for chefs definitely demand a little attention when their goofiness is on show but most of the focus will be on your own character’s interaction with the Colonel and a few other slightly less ridiculous human characters, although each of them have their own quirks that let them both play roles typical of a romance story while providing quite a few laughs with how they approach them. Aeshleigh is your main rival when it comes to trying to win the Colonel’s affection, often bare-faced in her flirtatious and selfish efforts but a surprisingly good if vapid cook so she’s not all bark and no bite. Often seen with her is Van Van the Man Man who is a stylish bully who will try to get you to back off with a bit more direct aggression, although his often pathetic efforts and overwhelming machismo means he is often put down a peg for picking on others. Rounding out the last of the consistent and important players is Miriam, your character’s best friend who you often go to for advice while also helping her with her own love life that goes in some amusing directions as well.

This eccentric class that isn’t entirely human makes for a cast that is able to quickly shift from one type of joke to another without the risk of these character archetypes grating against you, most of them having a bit more to them than basic archetypes or silly ideas so that they can at least engage in the broader cooking focus instead of derailing things any time they speak. The cooking is actually given a fairly big focus in the actions you take during the plot, there being moments where you need to complete a pop quiz, complete a timed rapid fire question barrage, or even properly pick the right steps during a cooking challenge. Mostly you won’t need deep food prep knowledge to get by and it can actually help to be aware of KFC’s usual offerings as going with them when you have multiple food choices is often the safest bet. In the cook-offs you can expect to see some gorgeously done art of various menu items from the restaurant that are no doubt meant to get your mouth watering, but it’s not like these moments are a break from the norm. When you see other students’ creations they are also illustrated with similar attention to detail, many of them not even close to the offerings you’d find at the real world restaurant. Some of them are still quite ridiculous, Van Van has meals he serves on the blade of an axe or inside a sea urchin split in half, but others like Miriam’s adorable tiny food do look delicious even though Japanese food isn’t really going to push you towards the company’s product. A running theme of having a personal connection with what you cook and earnestly prepared meals over showy ones also at least gives more heart to the idea that preparing something like a bowl of mashed potatoes for a contest some decent narrative justification. The character art is well done and has a good range of expressions, the music is actually very well composed and sometimes legitimately lovely, and even a few animated scenes exist like an impressive anime-style opening. There was definitely some care put into the game’s presentation, the visual novel format that usually allows for text and a smattering of images sometimes leading to lazy products but there was definitely a good deal of effort put into ensuring this game looked good.

Of course with Colonel Sanders being the romantic goal of this entire experience it was important to find a balance where he wasn’t too perfect but also still actually worth the level of attention given to him. I Love You, Colonel Sanders! does do a good job of having him show moments of weakness or even less than admirable reactions to certain responses you could give him, but he is still present as a master of food prep even when he’s more often making humble meals of fried chicken rather than something truly decadent. The game is aware that making you fall for this more handsome version of the restaurant mascot is silly and is happy to have moments where characters are depicted as overreacting in how enamored they are with him, and with the many flourishes and special affects added to his behavior like rose petals on the breeze, he is presented with a level of admiration that is clearly meant as a light-hearted joke. Real elements of the man’s life are roped into this fictional representation of him for an odd and sometimes incongruous bit of history but there is a fine enough arc to meeting the man and growing closer to him thanks to his own ties to the message about cooking being a personal experience, his presence often rooting things between the interjections of the more absurd supporting cast members.

Replaying the game to see different outcomes is initially made easy as you can select any chapter you have completed to attempt it again, but once your choices have diverted a bit too much you will be locked out of skipping ahead chapters to try and use them as junction points for different story branches. It is unfortunate you can’t make any manual saves and that does make pursuing unique game overs less appealing, but it also makes moments like when you’re tempted with dark magics that can help with your cooking a bit more weighty since undoing the choice isn’t so easy. It is a brisk game if you do fast-forward to familiar spots though so you can try and pursue such things, although the endings aren’t so divergent that you’ll feel you missed much with the one you did earn. Most of the ride is about seeing the unusual circumstances that arise from this game’s ridiculous concept and laughing at the ways the characters interact when the tropes of the dating sim genre are exaggerated or given unusual twists, the gameplay perhaps doing better when it has fewer stakes in the small choices you make since it’s not truly captivating you with its plot or the object of affection as much as it is setting up moments to laugh at. It at least doesn’t descend into pure joke telling so that it can build up a romance that then pays off with amusing interactions later, developer PSYOP seeming to know how to structure things well rather than being overly indulgent in the humor or the advertising.

THE VERDICT: While this advertisement in the form of a parody dating sim does definitely try to make KFC’s offerings look appetizing at parts, I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator puts in the work to make for a humorous ride that doesn’t bog things down with corporate rigidity. The supporting cast of original characters are endearingly absurd and provide a fair bit of the laughs while Colonel Sanders himself is presented with a ridiculous overblown spotlight to ensure you realize you aren’t expected to fall head over heels for him. The interactive moments can alter your story path and require a bit of thought to pick the right answer but mostly the experience works well when some well done art and music back up your progression through a delightful parody of dating sim tropes and even KFC itself.

And so, I give I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator for PC…

A GOOD rating. Perhaps there could be a world where a genuine attempt at a dating simulator where you try to win the affections of a corporate mascot would be created and it was meant to be judged on the earnestness of the romantic writing and the intricate systems determining if the plot has a happy ending for the player. Luckily, I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator isn’t trying to genuinely cultivate an affection for the anime twist on KFC’s late founder, the premise deliberately unusual and the game sticking with that as its approach. It has the quality of art and sound to provide a polished presentation throughout and the writing does its job well in drawing out humorous scenarios from its cooking class full of colorful characters. It doesn’t lean into the kind of substantial relationships you’d expect out of a game trying to tell a legitimate romance but as a comedy the pursuit of Colonel Sanders is an effective framework for its joke-telling. There is a fairly smart avoidance of simply trotting out someone like the dog professor and repeating the same joke with that character, such a direction likely to grow thin quickly but the game still tries to make sure it can get some mileage out of the unusual concepts by sprinkling them throughout the experience with unexpected developments like another student I’m loathe to mention simply because his lack of acknowledgement is used as good fodder for even more amusing situations. More effort was put into rounding out this experience beyond the silly premise and it makes it a fun playthrough for it, the game still amusing even if you swapped out Colonel Sanders for someone original.

It’s easy to see a product created to advertise something else and immediately reject it, but it’s not like I Love You, Colonel Sanders! is hiding an insidious unspoken bit of propaganda inside it. Advertising is part of society and it’s much better to see it done with some talent involved and with the intent to amuse rather than something hollow like slapping a billboard into a video game even when it doesn’t make sense in that game’s context. I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator is able to make its joke work and knows to wrap things up without them being too intricate to play or overly long to experience, achieving a good balance of pace and humor to make that simple play through an interesting and enjoyable one. The game never goes out of its way to tell you prices or deals from KFC either so if you do feel the need to defy it when its images of food make you crave fried chicken it’s not like it’s done much to rope you into its ecosystem. I am certainly prepared to identify a cynical attempt to place brand awareness over actual quality when it appears in a game like with Chase the Chuck Wagon or Sneak King, but a game is more than the branding stamped on it, and in this case, this delightful ribbing of cooking animes and dating sims provides enough amusing moments to make dating the Colonel a fun time.