Love Is All Around
A megahit Chinese FMV romance game that's surprisingly wholesome
Mac, PC, Steam Steam Deck
$9.99
intiny
3-6 hours
Love Is All Around is a Chinese romance game using first-person live action video (aka FMV). You’re Gu Yi, a young man who comes to the big city to pay off his debts and meets six women who, for reasons that are never convincingly explained, fall head over heels for you.
Every minute or so, multiple choice questions let you determine how the story unfolds. Your answers also change your “affection” level with women; if your total score is too low at the end of a chapter, you’ll need to replay part of it to proceed. Mechanically speaking, that’s pretty much it.
Love Is All Around is too sweet to be a Pickup Artist (PUA) game and it’s too simple to be a proper dating simulator. Nor is it a high concept interactive movie like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch. So what is it? The lowest concept imaginable: a wholesome romance drama… for guys… that’s funny!?
It’s so normal, in fact, that it wraps around, horseshoe theory-like, into being quietly groundbreaking. That, along with the actors’ impeccable acting and comic timing, may be why it’s sold 1.6 million copies according to GameDiscoverCo Plus estimates, which probaby makes it one of the most popular FMV games in history. Almost all of those sales are in China, but the English subtitles are perfectly serviceable.
Now, I don’t want to oversell its wholesomeness: it’s literally Male Gaze: The Video Game. Every woman you encounter is young, romantically available, and conventionally attractive. It’d score minus points on the Bechdel test. All that said, it’s much better than your average raunchy romcom like the American Pies; characters are broadly drawn but always have a bit of depth (the party girl is not just a party girl, etc.), there’s zero nudity, zero sex, and, incredibly, basically no titillation whatsoever. Not that that’s anything wrong with those things if done well, but usually they aren’t.
This is especially surprising given how the game starts. You wake up in a fancy apartment with no phone and no memory of how you got there. Your first task is to investigate its rooms, point-and-click adventure style, by clicking on objects, discovering the date from a calendar or noticing paint cans in the bin.
Once you’ve found all the “key information” in a room (i.e. clicked on all 3-5 things), the next video in the story plays. Uh oh, a young woman appears from a bedroom, Zheng Ziyan! You flashback to the gallery where you’re an assistant; she came in for a reception and you helped fix her skirt. It was too busy for her to get a cab home, so she invited you out to a cocktail bar: her treat, since you’re dead broke. A hilariously gauzy, dialogue-free drinking montage plays out in which we’re given to believe she connects with you.
Back in the present, Ziyan asks if you slept together. You can respond in three ways, but the answer is “no”. She messes with you by saying her husband will be back soon, then confesses she doesn’t know whose apartment this is, either. Cue another woman, Li Yunsi arriving – uh oh!! She asks if you know how you met; say it’s when you gave her a painting and she’ll observe, “Men are full of shit.”
Flashback: you’re staring at a painting instead of mopping. Your boss chides you but Yunsi admires your taste, so you’re told to give her a tour. She asks your opinion of an artwork. The two choices are “it’s something my uncle would paint” or “the colour and composition have a distinct style”. If you choose the latter, you rattle off an improbably informed disquisition on it that had me laughing out loud. Yunsi gives you her card, and you can choose to wave, hug, or shake hands; pick the latter, which suits her more reserved personality, and you get an extra affection point. It emerges that you drunk-dialled her to pick you and Ziyan up, which she’s none too pleased about.
In the space of a few minutes, the game has neatly set up the fact that you are hapless but smart, well-meaning but unlucky, the woman aren’t instantly in love with you, and that while the story is set in the real world, it’s also very silly. I complain a lot about how too many games are poorly edited – not this one. It’s very fast paced and you’re always onto the next adventure.
During the remainder of the first chapter, you find your lost phone at the cocktail bar from an irate waitress, Xiao Lu; reply to text messages; look for a new flat with your buddy Liu (“I’m working to consolidate real estate resources. OK, I’m an estate agent.”); and meet an army of prospective roommates. This takes around 20-30 minutes.
Each chapter concludes by summarising the affection levels of the women you’ve met. If your total score is too low, you won’t be able to start the next chapter; instead, you’ll have to visit the story map to replay scenes.
The map shows all your choices, including the ones you haven’t made yet. You can restart from any thumbnail to make new choices, though you’ll have to play all the way to the end of the chapter for your affection scores to update. Thankfully, you can fast forward or skip through any video you’ve previously watched. Unless you want to unlock some of the more obscure endings, there isn’t any need to exhaustively complete the story, and even then, you’re better off saving yourself the time and using the walkthrough.
Things that happen in the rest of the story:
Liu finds you a great flat – but Xiao Lu is already living there! You become friends and go to her graduation ceremony when her family can’t make it. Later, you whip up a home-made meteor shower lightshow when she isn’t able to see one at the park.
You’re ambushed by a childhood friend, Shen Huixin, who forces you to become her personal assistant. Huixin buys the gallery you work in, which you both run into the ground, though not before all your women friends join forces to decorate it.
You pretend to be Lin YueQuin’s boyfriend to annoy her ex-husband, whom you end up fighting (and losing to) in a boxing match. You then defend YueQuin’s son against accusations of bullying.
You’re run over by Zhong Zhen, a high-powered consultant, who lets you stay in her company’s storage room. When she complains about overworking, you take her on a trolley ride through the office.
Two things should be apparent. Firstly, this game burns through plot like it’s tissue paper. You barely spend five minutes with one woman before another appears out of thin air.
Secondly, Love Is All Around isn’t a dating simulator, it’s a manic pixie dream boy simulator – and you’re the boy. It’s genuinely sweet how much effort “you” put into making other people happy, it’s just a shame that all of them are women. But while the game is unquestionably sexist, there is blessedly little unpleasantness: everyone ends up becoming friends, or at least respecting each others’ qualities.
It’s a nice counterpoint to the thrum of economic insecurity and inequality that pervades the story. Gu Yi is forever interviewing for jobs, being hounded by his creditors, and having deep conversations about whether there’s room for anything in life other than making money. I wouldn’t mistake this game for a documentary, but it’s an interesting way to learn about how young men in China see themselves today.
While Love Is All Around’s designers are perfectly aware of the conventions and limitations of their chosen form, with meta jokes scattered liberally throughout (“Why can’t you speak in full sentences?”), you won’t find any gameplay innovations here. Is that a problem? No. The least interesting criticism you can make of a TV show is that it’s yet another 30-60 minute landscape video. Here, the creativity lies in the storytelling.
If nothing else, it’s unusual to see a game about a penniless Chinese manic pixie dream boy being pursued by six women – especially a game that’s this popular, funny, and sweet.
Sixth Tone and Shine have more background on the game’s development process and how it was received in China. Apparently a sequel is being made – for women!
Ok you sold me, I have to play this!