Let’s acknowledge a universal truth: young adulthood is messy. As we get older our relationship with our parents and our hometown starts to feel weird. Old hobbies get picked up and taken over by the younger generation, and, slowly but surely, we begin to leave a trail of relationships of all sorts in our wake. These years are colorful and loud and they simply do not stop coming—all that is to say that so far my twenties have been a series of epic highs and epic lows, and Thirsty Suitors encapsulates that nearly perfectly.
In Thirsty Suitors you play as Jala, a type of prodigal son returned to her hometown of Timber Hills after a nasty breakup. She’s a skateboarding legend in town with a litany of exes and a sour relationship with her family, all of which comes back to haunt her throughout the game. As the player it’s your job to help Jala repair her bond with her parents, track down her sister Aruni before her wedding next month, defeat the weird guy who’s named himself leader of the local skateboarding scene, and, most importantly, battle and reconcile with all of Jala’s exes still in Timber Hills. It’s part Indian serial drama, part turn-based combat, and part therapy. Much like your twenties, Thirsty Suitors packs a lot into one punch but, at times, I found myself wondering if that makes the punch less effective.
Upon booting up Thirsty Suitors, I was immediately taken with the game’s art style. It looks like a comic book in how it bursts off the screen and often uses over the top design elements, like a suitor’s eyes bugging out of their skull or the dog with a star on its face that you can teach to kickflip. Jala’s world is built on bright colors, sharp angles, and ’90s motifs like her cassette player, and when you battle an ex and enter into their subconscious world, you might find yourself surrounded by talking tigers or crystal castles. The look is part of Thirsty Suitors ‘ punch. Your eyes hardly find somewhere to rest, but that’s only because there’s always something new and interesting to look at in Timber Hills, which is something I never thought I’d say about suburban America.
Thirsty Suitors also handles better than I thought it would. I wasn’t even good at Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 , so I was a little wary of another skating game, but I was pleasantly surprised to find that Thirsty Suitors is smooth and easy to get the hang of. Combat and exploration also run well, but I did run into a handful of minor issues—menu options staying up during cutscenes or typos in dialogue, for example.
Aside from typos, the dialogue and storytelling is where Thirsty Suitors and I start to have some beef. I can’t find much information on the game’s developers—as in I don’t know their ages because there are parts of this game that feel like an older person attempting to write Gen Z characters. The lingo and conversation feel out of touch at times, and I’m going to give you two specific examples that are both etched onto my frontal lobe and explain what I mean:
Jala has an inner voice that narrates us through the game—she looks and sounds like Jala’s older sister, but her personality is totally different and she’s honestly a little mean. At one point in the game, Jala’s father texts her to come home because he has a special idea he wants to disclose to her. When Jala begrudgingly agrees, her inner voice tells her she is “so whipped.” What? Last I checked, “whipped” is only used in a romantic context. In fact, according to Urban Dictionary, “whipped” is “When a person, male or female is so in love with their partner that they will do anything for them.” That does not include your father. That was a very specific moment when I felt struck by the fact that someone imitating a young person must have written that line because, as a young person, I was upset and confused.
My second example comes from a battle with Jala’s middle school girlfriend. The drama they unpack is typically middle school petty, but it takes a turn when the two begin to make some very sexual references to their relationship. In an American context, middle schoolers are typically between 11 and 13 years old. Now I may be sheltered because I went to a Christian school, but I also don’t think I would be far off the mark in saying that most middle schoolers are not having explicitly sexual relationships, especially not to the degree that Jala and her ex are referencing. I reserve the right to be wrong and it’s not a bad element of the game to explore sexuality or sex in relationships, but the story surrounding it feels written by someone who either didn’t bother to Google how old middle schoolers are or has not been in middle school for a very long time.
With that out of the way, let me also heap praise on Thirsty Suitors ‘ storytelling. This is a rich narrative that carefully and truthfully deals with culture, family, LGBTQIA+ issues, relationships, and self-expression. You meet and interact with a diverse range of characters in terms of race, personality, and gender and sexual identity, and each are developed and dealt with in their own unique ways. The plot is equally diverse and draws on a number of different stories for Jala to unearth and resolve—in some ways this is good because I find it doesn’t allow for boredom in Thirsty Suitors, but I do think the game runs the risk of not being focused. When you’re trying to repair familial relationships, save Timber Hills’s skateboarding scene, and reconcile with exes, it’s hard for each of those stories to develop in complex and evenly-paced ways, but Thirsty Suitors does its best by giving every story its own focused element that defines it and supports the other stories.
When dealing with Jala’s family, cooking is king. At first it’s something your father encourages you to do to become closer with your mother, but it quickly becomes integral to combat and unraveling Jala’s larger story. The food you learn to make goes to your inventory and can be used to restore HP and WP (willpower which, like mana points, is the energy you need to execute attacks and keep fighting) during battles. Cooking also helped me refine Thirsty Suitors ‘ use of quick time event controls in a low stakes environment. Beyond all of that, though, is the fact that cooking can help you repair your relationship with your mother by taking part in a family tradition, and helps Jala better understand her father’s relationship to her LGBTQIA+ identity and her sudden departure, among other things. As it often is in real life, cooking in this game is therapeutic and healing. It bonds you to the story in ways other elements of Thirsty Suitors don’t.
Much like cooking is a peaceful reprieve from the vibrancy of Thirsty Suitors, the skateboarding elements also provide a break from the meat of the game. In skateboarding you find a side quest involving some weird masked townie getting local kids to join his “cult” at the skatepark. As side quests go, it’s pretty involved and strange, but I like that it teaches you other gameplay skills and lets you take a mental break from the game’s focus of reconciling with Jala’s exes. When skateboarding you’ll learn various tricks, earn special rewards and skills, and go on random obstacle courses at your leisure. Even though I don’t skateboard, it’s kind of what I imagine the real life hobby must feel like—involved, sure, with its own community and culture, but also a simple distraction around town from all the other issues dogging you.
Those other issues dogging you? Your exes. They run the gauntlet from third grade boyfriend to your on-again, off-again girlfriend until Jala left Timber Hills, but it seems they’re all out for revenge against you. Battles with suitors provide for the narrative bulk of the game as the title Thirsty Suitors might suggest, and they are where you gain the most gameplay experience. Battles are both tactical and straightforward, sometimes almost to a fault. After duking it out with a few exes, I felt like the turn-based combat became a little tedious and predictable, but that didn’t stop my own competitive spirit from trying to crush (er, reconcile with) them with all my might.
These fights are also where we get most of Jala’s backstory which, while relevant, does not always feel like the most appropriate place for exposition. In fact I think that’s why I began to feel some of these sequences were tedious—in between turns I was getting paragraph after paragraph about how Jala and her exes wronged each other. Again I do not discount the importance of these stories since they’re the core of the game, but I do wonder if we could have cut down, say, the skateboarding storyline in order to make more narrative room for Jala’s history with her exes. Spoiler alert: Jala is a largely unlikable protagonist.
Thirsty Suitors is, at the end of the day, a diverse game with a lot to offer. As a player it doesn’t let you rest and while the various storylines sometimes vie for your attention and get in each others’ way, they’re otherwise colorful and exciting enough to stand on their own and attract your time and attention.
Thirsty Suitors has a surprising amount to say about culture, acceptance, self-expression, and growing from your mistakes. That being said, I did not grow past my lifelong videogame mistakes, and, as I’ve done so often in the past, I failed to manually save the game at regular intervals. So when a glitch wouldn’t let me restart a battle after dying, I had to quit the game and return back to the start of the level. Much like Jala my mistakes caught up to me, but, unlike Jala, I doubt that will make me change my ways.
Thirsty Suitors is developed by Outerloop Games and published by Annapurna Interactive. Our review is based on the Nintendo Switch version. It is also available for PlayStation, Xbox, and PC.
Maddie Agne is an intern at Paste.