Wow, did you actually get to see the rod?

K-Pop: it’s everywhere! From Netflix having one of the best animated films in the last few years to BTS publicly shaming the Grammys for abject racism, it’s hard to deny the influence K-Pop has had on modern culture. Your kids like it, the teens like it, that one person at work is obsessed in an unhealthy way with it, it’s completely in! And now is the best possible time for industry workers everywhere to put in the time and effort to really try and get people not to focus on the incredibly predatory and imprisoning cycle of the K-Pop industry by sanitizing the whole ordeal with a video game. Welcome to K-Pop Idol Stories: Road to Debut, a game that thankfully is made by PQube so it won’t end like Perfect Blue! Though it honestly probably should!

You’re a former manager of a K-Pop girl group that has hit its apex and done wonders for the scene. Their success was your success, and now…it’s all over. No disgrace or crime or accusations of indentureship disguised as job obligations (can’t make this too realistic, now!), just gracefully retiring from being their manager. But you’ve got the power and soul in you to make another group, and dammit, you can do it again! With the help of everyone in the industry who wants you to succeed (especially after a generous but time limited loan), you’ll recruit the next face, legs and hips of the K-Pop facade, and everyone will totally love you and support you the whole way! Recruit women off of a job advertising or pick them up off the street and try hard not to think of Audition! Control their schedule and diet! It’s glamorous!

Over the course of several months, K-Pop Idol Stories lets you finely tune your girl group in the ways that you see fit, or the ways you’ll accidentally keep picking because of the game layout. You’ll get social points and schedule points at the start of each week, and you can decide how to lay everything out over the course of seven days. Much like Princess Maker and other games where you’re God to an innocent person, you can dump everything into hard work and sacrifice and hope they don’t grow to hate you, or you can balance things out with relaxation and recovery while you frantically stare at the calendar and watch the time tick down till you can never become famous again. You’ll gradually unlock more and more options for daily activities as you go along, letting the game become more complex and open deeper paths.

Just work for no pay for the next nine weeks and then you have the option to go on a picnic!

To its credit, K-Pop Idol Stories has some good sound throughout, at least for someone who isn’t a big fan of the genre. There’s a lot of bubbly background music, not to mention at least a few instances of vocals even for incidental tunes. There’s plenty of focus on music based mini games and events, so, if you’re a cursory fan of this sort of sound, you’re bound to hear something you like. Naturally, you aren’t going to hear any big names or groups that you’d recognize, but Wisageni Studio has really captured the atmosphere of what k-pop sounds like and what makes a song turn into a bop, or why some of the beats really turn into earworms that drive you through the day. If nothing else, that can be marked as a win.

Additionally, there are plenty of things to do within the game, even if some of the doing is merely waiting and watching. As you move deeper into your career, you add several layers of planning that become essential to success. You have a limited number of interactions each day that can deepen relationships with either the aspiring idols or the cast of instructors, publicists and other notables that make up your orbit. You can focus on work, training, relaxation or building up additional skills, like dancing and foreign language. By the way, I do really like that one of the first unlocks is studying the Korean language, acknowledging that today’s K-Pop groups consist more and more of men and women who didn’t necessarily grow up within South Korea. It’s a small but important aspect that adds a degree of care to the overall design.

Also realistic: performers working tirelessly to hone their bodies, then destroying trash food.

The visual aesthetics are decent, but it’s clear that K-Pop Idol Stories was developed for the more optimal PC build first and then gradually walked back to work on additional consoles, with the Switch coming in dead last. There are so many rough edges around the characters, the buildings and the various UX elements, giving it the feeling of a video that’s suffering in bandwidth and has to dial down the quality to keep coming through smoothly. The great irony there is that the game still occasionally hiccups and lags even though the most complex thing about the entire adventure is when you have to perform a series of minigames that are mildly pleasant at best and honestly quite frustrating at worst.

For example, during vocal training, you might be tasked with a rhythm based game that asks you to hit a button when a note lines up with an outline in a very Guitar Hero reminiscent way. This mini game takes entirely too long. For how much time you spend grinding through the week, this should be an in and out, thirty beats max quickie. Instead, it goes for well over one hundred notes, and, especially at the beginning, it’s just hitting the same button again and again. At least once you get to advanced vocal training there’s more variety in the buttons and thus complexity and challenge, but, in the starting stages, it’s an exercise in not failing on purpose because you’re tired of hitting the shoulder button.

Yue used body dysmorphia! It’s Super Effective! And Super Depressing!

One thing that was exceptionally odd was the evaluation section. I got when previous activities had musical based games: memorize and repeat colors, the aforementioned button pushing, etc. But you have to do an evaluation where your idol group competes against others for national recognition and ranking. Did you ever play Pokemon Diamond/Pearl, and they had the Pokemon Contests? Imagine that, but with groups of Korean women. Equal parts Pokemon Battle and beauty pageant, your attacks are randomized based off what you’ve been most practicing, and the category you’re competing in (glamorous, cute, fantasy) is completely up to chance, so your group might be way outside their wheelhouse. I can see why some dev thought this was a fun idea, but these are supposed to be people, right? I’m here for Korean Bloodsport, but you need to lead with that aspect of K-Pop Idol Stories.

Also, some of the aspects of the game in terms of how the industry views things is really unfortunate, bordering on upsetting. On the one hand, I can see the appeal and sort of “plucked from obscurity” mentality that goes with your avatar weaving through the street, dodging around shapeless and faceless nobodies to catch up to the golden representation of K-Pop’s future. On the other, I’m playing a mini game where I’m darting through the crowd, my eyes locked on a single woman that I need to engage with and convince to join my band. Anyone else see how awkward and awful that is? Or the mini game where I have to properly pour soju in order to toast with the bartender who hosted my band’s first gig. This game is probably being played by kids, right? I’m not trying to demonize alcohol, but maybe we didn’t need this?

This isn’t even funny, why the hell isn’t “involve the authorities” at least an option?

What I can demonize is how flippantly K-Pop Idol Stories treats some of the truly dark and sinister sides of the industry. At some point, one of your idols will get an email that contains candid photos of them from someone who is openly talking about stalking them. Your choices are to respond to the email, ignore it or ask the idol how they feel about it. Which…where’s the “call the goddamn police immediately before we have a Korean Selena” button? This bullshit already permeates the music industry, and it makes sense to shine light on it, but why be permissible? It’s almost as irresponsible as having the idols go drinking and develop overly familiar relationships with the manager during their time in the group. Why? I like my manager just fine, but the people in charge of my paycheck are the furthest thing from my mind during my downtime.

The most disappointing aspect of the game from a gaming perspective  is that much of it feels generated in a totally incongruous manner. You’ll get information from each day of activity, which is great: I prefer having some meat or details besides good/bad. But you’ll get things about wholly unrelated elements and try to figure out how that works. Like, you’ll get the notice that one of your singers hurt their throat during the vocal exercise, but get the praise “good job.” Or you’ll be doing a language session and get a message about breaking the exercise equipment. It felt very clear that it was just pulling from random pools of platitudes that never really made sense. It was almost as bizarre as when we went out drinking and our credit card declined, so I had to choose which rich friend would come pick up the tab. 

Wait, she struggled with her movement…during makeup application? And that was…good?

I don’t understand the power of K-Pop, and K-Pop Idol Stories: Road to Debut did nothing to entice me down that road. It’s a complex and interesting simulation game, sure, but it feels like it’s full of broken glass and really confusing notions that you can only justify/make peace with if you’re eyeballs deep in stanning. If you really want to know what it’s like to have a group of women gradually sell their souls and pretend you’re not the Devil incarnate, then definitely pick up this game, pretend you’re one of the good ones and go make fleeting stars out of strangers you may be grooming. Otherwise, there are plenty of other sim titles that are infinitely less sad and problematic, and, most importantly, run significantly better.

K-Pop Idol Stories: Road to Debut is available now on Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S.

Reviewed on Nintendo Switch.

A copy of K-Pop Idol Stories: Road to Debut was provided by the publisher.