Love Chase Review

The basic premise behind Love Chase is beautifully simple: you are hunting an escaped robot that looks just like a real human. There are six possible targets, all women. You have to get close and investigate them over the course of 30 days. This is an awesome framework, as it drives every interaction, adds suspense, and makes you question their idiosyncratic actions. Why is this person not eating? Why is that person afraid of water? Choices and scene investigations increase the suspicion value, based on how likely they are a robot.

The robot hunt is not perfect. There needed to be interrogations and a way to let the players determine if items are questionable or not. Still, it connects everything together so well that it might be the best pure dating sim premise ever.

The six love interests are diverse and have their own peculiarities. Doctor Su Xin is as cold as ice until you go on a date. Swimsuit model, Meng Lu, talks about being a fish out of water. The CEO, Jiang Yan, seems to have no emotion until she is prodded. Cosplayer, Nana Chan, acts weirdly while having a crush on you. Restaurateur, Wan Lin, has problems with her ex and keeps offering you strange food. And the personal trainer, KiKi, has a past that she does not want to reveal.

Most of the six are great, with good personalities and enough backstory to uncover. Nana-chan initially presents as my least favorite type (immature) but her story is actually one of the best in the genre. There are good interactions too, built off the robot investigation, and most of the romance is quite good. High favor and correct suspicion values will unlock paths and endings. Plus it is a relatively long game, taking over six hours to go through once and 12 to see everything. The free 4K video DLC is worth getting.

Sadly, most of the endings are insanely short, only two characters get adequate conclusions. Also, one big problem is that navigating the timeline is a nuisance. Favor values do not propagate forward. It merely transfers values from the last day. So if you change something on day 5, you can’t jump to day 25 and see it all updated, you have to iterate through all days, albeit with the option to skip. There are about 3-4 scenes per day, and some might have 4-5 choices in them. You cannot jump to a specific choice and can only start a scene from the beginning.

Even with these navigation quirks, there is a lot to like. Love Chase deserved stronger sales, but the least we can do is offer some appreciation.