Sucker For Love: Date to Die For Review - You've Got It Baaaad

When a game makes you wish you had a real life hot goat mommy to romance, you know you’ve got it baaaaad. 

Sucker for Love: Date to Die For is a sequel to 2022’s Sucker for Love: First Date from Developer Akabaka. Inspired by 90’s anime, both Sucker for Love titles feature a fun art style, unique characters and an out of this world story. And, in case I didn’t mention it, the sequel has a hot goat mommy. Okay, okay I’ll stop saying goat mommy. 

In Your Dreams

In Sucker for Love: Date to Die For you play as Stardust, a young woman who has found herself trapped in her rural hometown of Sacramen-Cho. After receiving a letter from your family, you decide to return to your childhood home to investigate, but everyone seems to be gone. While investigating your bedroom you’re introduced to Rhok’ Zan’ The Black Goat of the Woods and the player’s love interest for the remainder of the game. 

And therein lies my question of whether or not Date to Die For is really a dating sim or not. You only have one love interest and no actual dating happens during the game. Sacrificial rituals, body mutilation, smooches - yes. But dating? No. In fact, romance is a bit of an afterthought here. Akabaka does call the game a visual novel, but it claims dating sim first, which, after completing the game’s multiple endings over its four chapters, seems a strange choice.

Are You Gonna Eat That?

As mentioned, Date to Die For features four separate chapters that, after finding nearly all the endings (there’s still ONE thing I’m stuck on as of writing this), took me about five hours to complete. Players must reach each chapter's “true ending” to move on to the next, which isn’t very difficult to achieve as each chapter features just two endings though these endings aren’t always straightforward. 

To get to the end of each chapter, players will have to complete rituals to help Rhok’ Zan defeat a cult led by the hot-headed “Buck.” Each ritual requires players to collect items from around Stardust’s family home and use them in a variety of ways to do the ritual correctly. In some scenarios you’ll have to eat ingredients in a certain order, collect blood from a sacrifice and more while ducking and dodging Buck’s army known as The Thousand. 

Traversing around the house is simple, and you’ll have a map you can reference if you get stuck. After the first chapter, I pretty much had the layout memorized making getting around much quicker than chapter one. That being said, it does get repetitive wandering around the house by the end of chapter four, especially when you’re caught by a cultist multiple times and set back to where you started at your last checkpoint. 

Thankfully, Date to Die For’s atmosphere makes for an entertaining adventure. Despite the promise on the game’s Steam page of “No horror elements” Date to Die For can be genuinely creepy. Seriously. It would have been easy to just add in a few jumpscapes here and there, but Date to Die For has scary music, disturbing noises and eerie looking characters. You’ll be on the edge of your seat the entire time.

Who's the Real Sucker?

When you’re not performing rituals or running around the house, you’ll be speaking with characters and uncovering the story of Sucker for Love: Date to Die For. And the story is definitely the strong point here. Each character, apart from Stardust, is fully voice acted and the work done by the actors here is fantastic. Each actor took “90’s anime-inspiration” very seriously here. The voice acting, combined with the game’s art style, does give players a hit of nostalgia in some of the best ways. Rhok’ Zan is a memorable love interest, along with the other cast of characters players will meet along the way.

Sucker for Love: Date to Die For is a silly, scary and fun experience, but one that isn’t without its pitfalls. Chapter four for me in particular, was very glitchy and forced me to restart from a previous checkpoint more than once. And due to this, and the fact that the entire game is based in one place, gameplay is repetitive and can be aggravating if you get stuck on one section for too long. And, in my opinion, it’s not really a dating sim. But in terms of atmosphere, performance and story, the game is definitely entertaining and one that fans of the original will be sure to love.

Breakdown

Game: Sucker for Love: Date to Die For

Developer: Akabaka

Publisher: Dread XP

Availability: PC (Steam)

Reviewed on PC

Pros:

+ Entertaining story

+ Genuinely creepy moments 

+ Epic soundtrack

+ Fantastic voice acting reminiscent of anime

+ Gorgeous art style

Cons:

- Only one romance option (I love goat mommy, but is it really a dating sim if she’s the only option?)

- Repetitive gameplay

- Glitchy moments

Final Thoughts

Sucker for Love: Date to Die For isn’t exactly what the average player will expect when picking it up. It’s genuinely creepy at times which is great for horror fans, but doesn’t actually feature that much dating (or any dating to be honest) for something that claims to be a dating sim. Still, it’s fun, absolutely reminiscent of 90’s anime, and definitely has replay value for those who like collecting all the endings in visual novels. Now go kiss that goat mommy!

Reviewed by Becca Smith