alias_sqbr

Love Curse is probably my favourite purely f/f romance novel I've played to date. It's not quite on par with my favourite otome (since that's a much larger genre with more to pick from), but still better than the average.



It's a well made Chinese game about a 20 year old lesbian college student who suddenly gets cursed to find her soulmate or die, and ends up falling for one of four different women in her life while she navigates uni, work, relationships, and the supernatural. The love interests and romances are enjoyably varied, and are a fun mix of sweet and a little messed up, with a choice of both fluffy happy endings and darkly romantic bad ends with tragedy/controlling yanderes/implicit hatesex etc.

It's remarkably gay for Chinese media (maybe it's from Taiwan? EDIT: Nope, see comments), there's no onscreen sex but there are onscreen kisses and the relationships are 100% unambiguously romantic. It's not interested in exploring the politics of sexuality, but there's no homophobia to the extent that there's arranged f/f marriages, and practically no men or straight people are even mentioned except in passing.

The art is great, the Mandarin voice acting pretty good (though it's only for the love interests), the music ok, and the writing/translation reasonably good. The characters/plots aren't pure shallow tropes but there's not a lot going on under the surface. If you're not a fan of f/f romance you will be very bored, but if you are you should have fun. The protagonist is mostly a Nice Girl but actually pushes back pretty stubbornly when love interests do things she doesn't like, which makes the bad ends a lot more fun.

The love interests are a coldly lonely CEO (Victoria), bouncy and needy younger childhood friend (Nyx), Perfect Model Student with hidden cracks (Iris), and a driven snarky butch (Eleanor). I really liked the first three, though Nyx took a little while to win me over, and Iris's good end wasn't as engaging as her bad end. For some reason I bounced off Eleanor and couldn't bring myself to finish her route but she seems generally well liked. This means I also missed the "true" ending which ties up the remaining plot threads.

Everyone tends to engage in red flag behaviour even on good ends, but noone's too bad by romance game standards (though for Eleanor I'm just going off a summary I looked up) Personally a little red flag behaviour adds spice to a romance for me but if you want PURE fluff this is not the game for you, and if you want to only see happy romance use a walkthrough to avoid the bad ends.

It's a pure visual novel: I don't remember any timed responses or minigames requiring fast reaction times, and there's autoplay and skip read. There's a few sections where you have to click a fair few times to read phone messages in a smallish font.