Living on Earth is sometimes an ordeal, but it can be boiled down to a single tenant. The rule of survival in this berserk biome of anger, lust, and lootboxes is very simple: do what makes you happy as long as it doesn’t hurt someone else. Or, if it does hurt someone else, have their consent and hopefully it also makes them happy. So yeah, you might not love all the different kinds of music, comics and interpretive art that’s out there, but so what? Let other people enjoy it and sod off if you can’t just let them appreciate that. This is something that I kept reminding myself, over and over again, as I dove deeper and deeper into SAEKO: Giantess Dating Simulator, the latest title from Hyper Real. I thought I was going to be playing a romance title, and I was right. Sort of.

Well, when you put it that way, I’m totally not afraid!

Here’s some weird stuff out the gate, and it just keeps getting weirder. You, a person named Rin, suddenly wake up in a drawer with amnesia and just a couple other people around you. After a very confusing engagement where your sex is over analyzed by an uncomfortably awkward fanatical character, you meet the titular Saeko, who is a normal sized human woman that has gained the power to shrink people down to bite size. This measurement is important, because she also has developed a taste for tiny people. Now, you, the “supervisor” of the drawer, must keep the other denizens healthy and appealing, so that, each day, Saeko can choose one to eat and stay happy. Saeko’s happiness is very important. After all, you aren’t the first supervisor, so why should you think you’ll keep your job (and your life) if you’re not making Saeko happy?

SAEKO: Giantess Dating Simulator is divided into three parts: day, night and bedtime. During the day, you must talk with everyone in the drawer to get their story and their ideas, while also figuring out who needs certain types of attention. One food item will be present, and feeding that to someone marks them for death at Saeko’s hand. The little people also will have depleting health over time, so you need to make sure they don’t expire on their own, because that’s not fun and also a waste of food for Saeko.  The characters all have their own personalities, backstories and reactions, but they’re also very willing: if you decide someone needs to eat, they will hem and haw, but ultimately chow down on the oversized treat that serves as their last meal.

Thanks for being a pro, Kina. Enjoy the milk! And…everything that happens next!

Most of the world building comes from this section. All of the characters who get dropped into the drawer will have a bit of backstory, and some will have connections to Rin, though how much you believe that with your amnesia is up to you. It’s an oddly balanced section: the dialogue that you exchange, while being quite well written, is mostly filler and atmospheric. It’s an awkward fit, because you get these details about someone’s personality, interests and fears, and then you usually have to decide if they’re about to die in a very undignified manner. The environment of the drawer doesn’t change much except for the swapping of foodstuffs to feed the tribute victim, so you simply need to vibe along as you’re entreated to tales of forlorn hopes, deferred dreams, and that some people are actually having sex in this drawer. Like I said, awkward.

After this horror comes the real “dating” aspect of the game, where Saeko talks to you while writing something or walking about. She’ll throw out thoughts, questions and observations, and it’s up to you to respond in a limited amount of time with an even more limited pool of words to use. It’s the most important aspect of the game outside of the survival of daytime: being able to intuit what Saeko wants to hear and how to better connect with her not only builds towards certain endings, but also your own life. Saeko doesn’t want to be ignored, nor interrupted, and she has opinions that she wants you to validate, but she won’t say what they are. Get enough good answers and you can safely call it a night. Piss her off more than once and she’ll decide to kill you right then and there.

I used to, but I feel like my current reality makes it so I don’t focus on those so much now.

Players looking for completionist levels of gaming in SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim will be spending a moderate amount of time in the nighttime section. Timing is everything to make sure you don’t answer too early or too late, gauging the right window based on how fast the floating words appear and disappear. You should know, by the third night, how Saeko feels about aspects of humanity, fashion and art, but even then she can throw you a curveball, and she wears her displeasure on her face. While the Nintendo Switch version doesn’t have achievements (I can’t believe I’m still complaining about this almost a decade later), there is a collection of items that appear in Saeko’s room for the bedtime section that shows you what you’ve “accomplished.”

The bedtime section is a wild view of the game through the lens of a classic flip phone. Here, Rin is able to scan the news of the day, read some phone novellas, play a little game and check general information about SAEKO itself. The news of the day acts as a background update as to how this isn’t something that just goes unnoticed. Saeko is clearly kidnapping people and then killing them, and that slowly builds in drama and pressure as the crimes escalate. You can also read Saeko’s incoming emails which further portrays a strange and lonely existence of a woman who feels like she’s somehow broken or different. I mean, she’s using magic to shrink people and ultimately eat them. There’s going to be someone who’s playing and thinks “I can fix her” in spite of all these crimes; maybe that lucky person is you!

Oh thank God, I really was waiting for you to be committed to the whole cannibalism thing!

The avantgarde styling of SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim is what keeps me invested in this horrifying art piece of a game. The pixel art isn’t just a bit rough, it’s specifically drawn in different manners of amateur animation to accentuate moments of cartoonish happenstance in the middle of a hellish existence. The cycles of animation can underline deliberate actions taken by Saeko and the smaller people, while the clipped movement of the drawer being opened or people being picked up adds to the helpless horror that always sits, muttering in the background. Even the cell phone game you play – an autorunning skateboard game – has the contrast of the character being a simple stick figure, but its death coming from a very detailed giant sneaker stamping down. The choices made are fascinating.

Lastly, I feel like the creator was also having a bit of fun with the soundtrack. Every character has their own track and score to go along with their interaction, giving further depth to their personalities as you chat with them. It adds to the weight of needing to decide their fate, whether it comes as a necessary evil or you decide to have them exit for your own comfort. When Saeko sits down to do her homework and chat with you, the music feels like a dark parody of the chill hip-hop beats that used to be so popular on YouTube, complete with an animated girl studying. Only this animated girl is a hair’s width away from crushing the life out of you, so do with that what you will. It’s a trip, and the game’s creator, kyp, is also the composer, so be sure to check out the soundtrack.

So we all have that one friend, right?

There is a never-ending sea of dating sims out there, and it attunes to all flavors, all walks of life. SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim seems to tread the line between homage, satire and genuine entry, crafting a narrative and a world so beyond comprehension that it borders on absurd, but never reaches that level. It has some sincerity to it that keeps you locked in and invested, even if you don’t understand. I was thrilled to watch and understand the direction of the ending, wondering, vaguely, if I was a monster for daring to allow Saeko to explain herself. Perhaps I am. Perhaps we all are. But, in the haze of destruction and carnage, there is acceptance and love. It might not be right. It might be a crime. Yet it felt real, and, for just a moment, you understand. And that might be the greatest magic that Saeko can pull off.

SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim is available now on PC and Nintendo Switch.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim was provided by the publisher.