Thirsty Suitors (Xbox Series X)
Tradition is a double-edged sword. Traditions are a beautiful way to connect with your family and cultural past but also often form into rigid mindsets bearing the painful weight of old ideas. To try and make the past agree with the changes of the present is a difficult balancing act but it can be a worthwhile one, and for a girl like Jala Jayaratne, it feels like forging a relationship with her cultural and queer identity might be the only way for her to find herself, especially after the whirlwind of broken hearts she left behind in her previous attempts to do so. All that soul-searching has come to roost in Thirsty Suitors, this turn-based role-playing game seeing Jala contend with her exes and family not so much as villains, but as people she wants to forge healthy connections with after finally committing to getting her act together.
Thirsty Suitors begins with Jala returning to the small American town of Timber Hills after a rather bombastic exit on the arm on the mayor’s daughter. Being caught up in someone else’s whirlwind and summarily tossed aside has helped put things in perspective for Jala though, all the people she cared about but tossed aside to pursue her desires now the people she wishes to make right with, especially as she learns her own sister is getting married soon and those bridges she burned mean she hadn’t been told about it. Jala initially hopes to find her sister and talk through their issues, but Jala’s exes hear she’s back in town and aim to work through their unresolved issues either by trying to win Jala back or accosting her as revenge for her treatment of them. Jala definitely starts off the story on the backfoot, the game opening with a hostile personality quiz where we learn quite a bit of how fickle Jala was when she was young no matter how you answer it, but her desire to make reparations with people seems genuine, even if she can’t help but be a bit sarcastic or sometimes feel the pull of her olds ways.
Jala’s emotional growth over the story is a good backbone for the plot, and an interesting choice was made in giving part of her mind its own voice. Known as the Narrator, Jala’s subconscious looks like her sister and is a way to actually get to know that sister despite her not appearing in the plot for some time as well as a means of showing the doubts Jala still carries about her ability to fix her own life. It also gives us a window to the kind of things that can’t be said out loud, like how Jala’s relationship with her mother involves being undermined by implication and Jala feels unable to speak up because of the family dynamics that would make being direct taboo. Jala’s cultural heritage, primarily her South Indian side, is given a good deal of focus, especially with how important relationships are. In fact, one of the main sources of smaller battles in the game’s RPG side involves suitors your grandmother sends because she pre-approved them as suitable spouses, the cultural pressure to marry a nice traditional man and settle down not necessarily gelling with Jala’s free spirit and bisexuality.
The exes you encounter in the game’s boss battles all seem to have their own woes where culture, family, and love seem to clash, and the main way Jala seems to choose for making things right is turning the fights into chances to help them work through their actual issues. Many of the exes have unfairly burdened Jala with trying to validate their choices, but Jala herself unfairly treated their relationships often as amusements rather than close bonds, so navigating their lingering longing with trying to actually be emotionally earnest ends up the more important element of these confrontations than the substance of the fight. The exes do have some interesting issues, many of them trying to juggle their personal wants and identities with the expectations placed up on them. Irfan, for example, is a sweet golden boy that everyone seems to view as an example of a well-behaved man, but it has lead to him suppressing his true thoughts and emotions. Andile, however, is openly non-binary, but in their bid for acceptance they’ve clung so deeply to their cultural ties they’ve disappeared behind them.
These can sound like serious issues, and Thirsty Suitors doesn’t dismiss the concerns that arise during them. Trying to balance a queer identity with cultural traditions is approached with some serious thoughts and opinions from the involved characters, but the backdrop to them is often energetic, humorous, and approachable. After all, the most important discussions about these issues arise during the game’s “psychodrama” boss battles where everyone steps out of reality for a bit for something that revels in its bombastic presentation. In fact, presentation is Thirsty Suitors’s greatest strength, from excellent voice acting bringing the characters alive to the art style focusing so heavily on over-animating even simple actions. When Jala comes home for the day, she does a cartwheel to throw her jacket on the rack and take off her shoes. During the cooking minigames, Jala will turn upside-down and spin to mix ingredients. There are even completely optional opportunities around Timber Hills to do quick timed-button press challenges where the reward is just seeing how Jala might delightfully overcomplicate petting a dog or lifting weights. The psychodrama battles take things even further, the world and characters shifting into surreal stages where someone like the confident Diya can have her fight take place in a crystal queendom or where someone like Bruno can have his coping mechanisms manifest as clones of himself who keep him invincible while they’re still active. The psychodrama battles are always a sight to see, but with even casual interactions sometimes featuring characters moving in wild and interesting ways, it’s hard not to get excited about any new element introduced to the game’s world.
However, while everything looks wonderful, the plot can feel a bit rushed, especially if you don’t deviate into the side content. Sometimes you can go from one ex fight to the other rather quickly, although thankfully most do have follow-up quests where you can more properly reconcile with them rather than just hoping to work out your issues in one grand battle. What really needed greater depth though was the battle system itself. The combat in Thirsty Suitors is primarily focused on inflicting status effects and then exploiting them to deal heavy damage, and this does at least tie to the heavy focus on understanding the emotional state of someone, albeit less to help them here and more to hurt. Enemies will resist some statuses but prove susceptible to others, fights often about sussing out which ones will work through experimentation. This is thankfully guided by your understanding of your enemy. For example, the Thirsty status effect where people become so lovestruck they stumble over themselves and throw out random attacks is great to use on people who are still pining for Jala. For more confident sorts you might want to Shock them and make them lose turns as they process what you said or you might say something to leave them Heartbroken so they take gradual damage and are weakened. Jala is just as vulnerable to these, but the game lets you defend yourself or inflict extra damage by doing some timed button presses properly. It’s actually fairly easy for Jala to become quite strong and overequipped, trivializing some of the fights, especially thanks to an odd sidestory about a rundown half-finished theme park full of skaters where you’re trying to convince teens to not put their faith in the weird mascot who is preying on their own emotional and cultural problems that arise from a sense of otherness.
However, the ease with which you clear the battles does raise an interesting question: why do you fight battles in an RPG? While there are some challenging and interesting ones out there, they’re often rewarding you with progress on the adventure and seeing more of the story, and in Thirsty Suitors, the story is often interwoven in the fights against characters. Often the actual attacks are less important than the dialogue, the player often given the chance to reply to whoever they’re facing off with. Most of the time Thirsty Suitors will give you three distinct options when it’s time to say something that cover a few different tones, and beyond their importance in actually working on the issues the person you’re fighting has, they also tap into a system that was almost interesting. Jala can develop a “Thirstsona”, where picking dialogue with a certain tone will earn you credit towards being a Bohemian, Heartbreaker, or Star. What these amount to mostly involves how your stats grow, but the difference isn’t so stark that you feel you need to commit to one style. In fact, it’s often more important to earn Thirstsona points at all rather than what they are, and since they’re often rewards for doing side content, you can use that as a motivator to do them on top of the charm and presentation put into most of the aesthetic elements of Thirsty Suitors.
The fights are ultimately more a means of providing interaction with characters rather than being too compelling on their own merits, and that can almost be said of the cooking too. Jala is able to make a range of traditional dishes with either her mother or Sri Lankan father instructing her, these a chance to better know your family and contextualize the cultural pressure Jala herself feels since so much of the rest of the game focuses on interpersonal relationships outside the house. The cooking mostly involves pressing buttons with the right timing as well as building up Heat that can be used to do special versions to earn more approval from your parents, but it’s not too hard to hit the max of three stars so it feels like another element where you’ll probably be more interested in the context than the task. However, the fights and cooking at least don’t push their limits too hard, not outstaying their welcome or inviting too much attention compared to the story happening around them.
The skateboarding on the other hand feels rather sloppy. Jala chooses to get around Timber Hills mostly on her board, and a rather weak combo system was attached to this if you wish to perform tricks as you do so. The appearance of the skateboarding continues the game’s great animation work, made even more amusing as you can unlock the characters you meet to skate around as instead so you can see them do incredible athletic tricks, but the trick system is loose and feels a bit unrewarding when you can just perform a bunch rapidly rather than needing to work hard on figuring out how to set things up. Luckily, the game doesn’t really expect you to be decent at it, and while there are a surprising number of skateboarding challenges to do, most are completely optional and few actually tie to scoring well. Instead, they’re often more about navigation a space quickly, doing things like collecting floating neon burgers in a time limit or doing specific tricks to make ground appear. These are often more about movement which still isn’t the best on the board at times, the game sometimes overzealous in magnetizing you to ziplines but at others you’ll bump into corners or need to take a turn just so to hit the clear times. Skateboarding feels more like a way to add extra value to the game but it also feels a bit discordant with it, this form of gameplay trying to stand on its own merits and often feeling a bit rough even when it concocts some pretty decent challenges.
THE VERDICT: The style, the characters, the music, and the compelling dive into every person existing at a crossroads of their personal wants and their societal connections makes Thirsty Suitors the kind of game you want to love, and it is often fairly good at focusing on its strengths. The combat is often more about the conversations and chances to show off some more of the game’s impressive visuals and animations, and even when they’re not too hard, elements like the cooking still provide some entertaining enough action to supplement the deeper looks into the complex relationships Jala has. Relegating the skateboarding as something not too important to the main adventure was wise considering its issues, but the action in general feels like it’s lagging behind the excellent story.
And so, I give Thirsty Suitors for Xbox Series X…
A GOOD rating. If the premise of Thirsty Suitors intrigues you, the gameplay won’t get in the way of you enjoying it thankfully. However, it does feel like its exact approach to turn-based combat feels like it could have been made more interesting. The status effects tapping into gauging your opponent’s emotions is a great choice for a game so focused on the personal relationships you have with the people you’re facing off with, but the follow-ups after guessing and the generally low level of danger makes it not feel all that rewarding to have figured out what will work. With timed button presses already given so much focus, it almost feels like Thirsty Suitors could have worked as a sort of rhythm game instead, that also a perfect way to lean into its amusing animations. The characters and how you interact with them are the stars of Thirsty Suitors though and the game gives that plenty of time to shine, Jala incredibly well-realized even if some of her exes or other side characters could have benefited from more of a spotlight or at least some side quests to deepen your relationship with them. Thirsty Suitors does keep pulling you back in as you want to see its imaginative approach to stepping out of reality for its big moments while still having its conflicts feel grounded, personal, and even relatable regardless of whether you identify with the specifics of a character’s problems. Being able to pick what to say as a sort of counselor to these people does give the story more weight than if you were just an observer, but it feels like Thirsty Suitors could have found more ways to make your actions outside of that more valuable. The cooking feels like it might get the closest even if it is a bit permissive, but its concept fits better than the fights, and generally making minigames out of other forms of interaction could have been how to give the game a gameplay edge on top of its many successes elsewhere.
The captivating creativity of its presentation and the heart put into exploring a range of realistic personal struggles makes Thirsty Suitors a satisfying game experience even if its the action side of things often isn’t doing much to hold your attention. The story doesn’t disappoint, performing an impressive balancing act of presenting complicated issues while remaining light-hearted and even following through on reconciling past the big psychodramas that could have easily been the end of trying to make amends in a weaker story. Thirsty Suitors is still a standout title with the important parts handled particularly well, the kind of experience that thrives when you know what you’re getting into rather than trying to make more out of the gameplay parts that exist primarily in service of the story.