No artistic medium wants you to fall in love with it like video games. Books, movies, TV show, songs: They might all try to grab hold of those potent, giddy emotions at various points, evoking the yearning and miseries of love in all its many forms. But only gaming can look you dead in the eye, give a soft little smile, and invite you to “Press X to fall in love.”
Or not!
Because while the vast majority of video games that traffic in romance are all about hurtling headlong toward that perfect and most romantic of happy endings—i.e., the one where your player avatar pours enough time, attention, and “gift points” into a facsimile of a human being that they’ll let you have fake “fade to black” sex with them—there have also been games willing to play with the other side of romantic desire. The one where it doesn’t work out; where the pixels explain it’s just not you, it’s them. The one where you get shot down or dumped by a video game, even though you may have paid upwards of 70 dollars to play it. It’s the ultimate digital indignity—and a fascinating one.
So, here’s to the video game characters that don’t just play hard to get, but who genuinely mean it from the bottom of their hard-coded hearts. The rare gaming characters willing to tell their players no—or dump their asses when the time comes.
Joker, Mass Effect 3
Like many role-playing franchises from game studio BioWare, the Mass Effect games are essentially a sexual and romantic buffet, with some light galaxy-saving in between. Want to make it with an alien badass with rocks for a face? A tough-as-nails outlaw psychic? A space racist? You can. (Although nobody dates the space racist.) But while Mass Effect player character Commander Shepard is basically a minor martial god by the time the third game in the sci-fi franchise rolls around, there’s one final frontier they’re ultimately unable to breach: Seth Green’s pants. Players can raise the topic of having sex with their long-time sidekick/pilot Joker (Green) near the end of the series’ third game, bringing it up awkwardly while he’s trying to tell you about his budding relationship with artificial intelligence EDI. At which point, Joker offers up one of the only actual player-aimed romantic rejections in the entire series; even if he couches it in concerns about fraternization—and offers a deeply uncomfortable promise that he would “rock your world” if the circumstances were different—it’s still a polite but firm shutdown. It’s probably for the best: Joker has a physical condition that makes his body incredibly fragile, and Shepherd is a half-robot badass with a body count in the hundreds by this point in the series, so god knows how he’d have survived his own personal Suicide Mission, anyway.
Everybody, eventually, Cyberpunk 2077
There’s a surprising melancholy streak that runs through CD Project Red’s Cyberpunk 2077, one that belies its various marketing claims of violent and depraved excess in a degenerate future. That applies especially to its romances, which, like so much of the game’s plot, are as much about the way things end as the ways they begin. Cyberpunk can front-load its rejections, with its various companion characters, shock of shocks, actually having sexual interests and preferences that preclude, say, a male-presenting version of main character V dating some of them. (Not that that’s stopped modders from trying to “fix” these character traits in particularly facile fashion.) But even if you successfully fall in love with the likes of secretly sweet hacker Judy Álvarez or aging rock star Kerry, love can only get you so far in a world where corporations own everything, and where you’ve got a tumor that looks and talks like Keanu Reeves steadily growing in your head. (Long story.) The softest, but most brutal of these rejections come in the new ending added with the game’s downloadable content, Phantom Liberty: It turns out you can’t disappear for two years on mysterious errands and expect the world to hold still for you, no matter how many love scenes or declarations of eternal love you’ve earned along the way.
Papyrus, Undertale
As with most of the more conventional gaming bits in Toby Fox’s indie darling, “dating” in Undertale is really just there to poke fun at those same conventions. Going on a date with goofball skelebro Papyrus, for instance, starts by bringing the player into the game’s combat mode, and continues with ever more ridiculous flourishes, like a “dating HUD’ that includes information on weather, crime statistics, and a meter clearly copied straight out of a fishing video game. Even as you marshal you Dating Power to overcome your quarry, though, it’s clear that you’re out-matched: Papyrus is on to your secret plan to wear clothing to signal interest, your attempts to parry his hyper-effective spaghetti gifts, and your weakness to T-shirts that straight-up declare their wearer a “Cool Dude.” After all the build up, though, your bony bud has no choice but to let you down easy, explaining that, while he was hoping going on a date would spark feelings for you that he genuinely lacks, you’ll always be friends. (“Don’t cry because I won’t kiss you,” he pontificates. “Because I don’t even have lips.”) You even get his phone number out of the ordeal, complete with an invitation to call him whenever you’d like. (“Platonically.”)
Yrliet, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader
Owlcat Games’ Rogue Trader puts players in an uncommonly powerful position within the endlessly violent and grim universe of Games Workshop’s long-running Warhammer 40K tabletop franchise: As a Rogue Trader—a sort of blend of pirate captain and merchant king—the player can typically decide who lives or dies pretty much on a whim. But the heart is far more complicated than a few blood-soaked edicts, and that goes doubly so for the inhuman one. Diligent Rogue Traders can romance Yrliet, a space elf (Aeldari, if you want to be formal) who ends up as part of your entourage, despite the Imperium Of Man’s general raging xenophobia against all things alien. But god help you if you try to begin said romance by flirting with the outcast sniper. Or touching her. Or, really, expressing any kind of romantic or sexual interest period, since Aeldari basically consider humans to be on par with talking, soulless apes with guns and spaceships, and treat sexual advances from the entire species as an offer to engage in gruesome bestiality. You can chip away at part of Yrliet’s built-in revulsion at your face and body and brain, but it’ll take awhile: There’s taking it slow, and then there’s “frequent meditation sessions and forgiveness of genuine, horrifying betrayals in between getting called a ‘mon-keigh’ on a daily basis” slow.
Alisa, Harvest Moon: Sunshine Islands
The Harvest Moon farming simulator games treat getting married as not just an expression of a romantic bond, but as a sort of all-purpose social status symbol/easy recruitment tool for farm labor. (2003’s A Wonderful Life takes this to a bizarre extreme: Fail to woo a bride before that title’s first year is up, and you’re forced to either wed a default option, or lose the game outright.) Finding a love connection is made easier by the fact that romance in Harvest Moon is shockingly straightforward and mercenary: Expending some of your (extremely precious) time talking to your would-be spouse and giving them presents increases their heart meter, with the game usually offering up a wide variety of eligible bachelors and -ettes for players to throw the ol’ Blue Feather at. A rare exception pops up in Nintendo DS title Sunshine Islands, though, where players meet Alisa, a priestess for the local Harvest Goddess. As with most women of a certain age in these games, players are free to raise Alisa’s hidden “heart levels” through the usual methods. Actually propose marriage, though, and she’ll remind you she’s a nun and politely shoot you down. Players were apparently irked enough by this that developers relented a year or so later: 2010’s A Tale Of Two Towns gave players the option to use magical stones to call up the Harvest Goddess personally and wish for her to let Alisa know it was actually completely okay for her to ditch her duties and get hitched.
Aveline, Dragon Age 2
BioWare’s Dragon Age games seem to be in a running contest with the studio’s own Mass Effect to see who can fill up the biggest trough with romantic offerings: Last year’s DA: Veilguard was notable for making every single one of the game’s seven companions available to romance, in a staggering display of playersexual behavior. Which leaves us feeling just the slightest bit indebted to Dragon Age 2‘s no-nonsense Aveline, one of the only companion characters in the entire franchise not susceptible to the wiles of a person who draws all their conversation options from a big wheel with a bunch of facial expressions printed on it. You can flirt with the stalwart City Guard commander all you like, but she’ll make it clear, again and again, that she simply doesn’t see DA 2 main character Hawke in that way, no matter how well you pick your dialogue options. It’s a genuinely nice change of pace to get told “No thank you,” from a series that seems almost obsessed with “yes.” (Meanwhile, if you just want to get dumped as hard as a human/elf/dwarf/qunari has ever been dumped, consider playing through the DLC for Dragon Age: Inquisition with a romance with a version of mercenary badass Iron Bull who remains loyal to his people. Nothing says “bad break up” like people writing folk songs for years about how badly you got played.)
Princess Peach, Super Mario Odyssey
Few characters in fiction have been subjected to more unwanted wedding ceremonies than Nintendo’s Princess Peach. Maybe that helps explain why, when her long-time paramour/plumber Mario finally decides to make an honest unelected head of state of her at the climax of 2017’s weirdly wedding-obsessed Switch title Super Mario Odyssey, Peach passes up a prime opportunity to become Luigi’s sister-in-law. (The fact that Mario is being kind of weirdly pushy, urging her to pick him over his frequent enemy/her frequent kidnapper Bowser, probably wasn’t helping.) The Mario games have always played fast and loose with the romantic relationship between Mario and Peach—she’s as likely to thank him for repeatedly dying on her behalf with baked goods as a smooch—but Odyssey is one of the rare times she explicitly tells the heroic plumber to back off. (Maybe she knows he’s also been making eyes at his ex Pauline, who’s now ruling New Donk City; say what you like about Mario, but the man has a type, and it’s powerful women with a tendency to be manhandled by large lizards and/or apes.)
Serana, The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim: Dawnguard
You can marry a lot of people in Skyrim, picking one of several dozen candidates/employees to form a life-long and deep personal bond with that involves them, uh, cooking you daily meals and serving as a replenishing cash supply. (The dream!) Typically, pitching woo in the Nordic lands is pretty simple: You do some quests for your target, break their brains by exploiting the game’s simplistic friendship values system, and then show up wearing a gaudy trinket called the Amulet Of Mara that lets them know you’re in the mood to wed. There’s only one major character in the game who will acknowledge that you showed up wearing the “Let’s get hitched” necklace, but won’t respond to it positively: Token good vampire Serana, from the game’s bloodsucker-focused expansion Dawnguard. Given how much time you spend running around the arctic wastes with Serana, hunting her evil kin, you’ll probably end up building up a fair amount of rapport with her by the time the DLC is over. Try to pop the question, though, and not only will you get told “You’re great,” she’ll even drop a classic “It’s not you, it’s the fact that I’m undead and going into a temple would make me feel like I was dying all over again.” Way to fast travel yourself straight into the friendzone, bud.
Both love interests, The Witcher 3
The Witcher series (from Cyberpunk studio CD Project Red) has a, let’s say, complicated relationship with sex. By its third game, at least, the series was taking Geralt Of Rivia’s mutant fuckboi tendencies slightly more seriously than it had in the past. (Since this is a franchise that rewarded players of its first game with trashy nude trading cards every time they bedded one of its female characters, there was really nowhere to go but up.) The Witcher 3 allows you to pretty easily play a strictly monogamous Geralt, rekindling a romance with either the canonical-from-the-books-and-later-the-TV-show Yennefer, or her old friend Triss, both passionate women and mages of considerable power. Or you could try to sleep with both of them, and find out why pissing off two women with notable vindictive streaks backing up their magical might is a really bad idea. Not only does the promised “threesome” the pair lure Geralt in with leave him chained to a bed while his former paramours walk off with his wine. It also locks him into some of the game’s worst endings, as he spends the rest of his life never recovering the loves he thoughtlessly squandered. As a finale for Geralt’s story, The Witcher 3 has serious thoughts about who its hero wants to be once he’s filled his lifetime quota of monsters slain; fuck around too much, and he’ll simply be the guy who found out—and never anything more than that.
The Ex-something, Disco Elysium
The thing about the break up, the rejection, the ex-something lurking at the back of ZA/UM’s detective game masterpiece Disco Elysium, is that it happens somewhere your dysfunctional detective hero can never touch: the past. You can only visit it in dreams, and even then, only through a veil of metaphor: Your ex Dora transmuted through the imagery of religious leader Dolores Dei, impossibly young and perfect and ready to be anywhere but with you. Disco Elysium spends a long time outlining the things wrong with your main character before it gets to this moment, letting you see all the ways he’s damaged a not-inconsiderable mind through the paired poisons of drink and drugs and all-consuming sadness. His brain is a toybox of competing ideas and impulses, each chiming in to help investigate dead bodies, or navigate complex social situations, or intuit random leaps that might help you solve the game’s central murder mystery. And all of them are united in their utter uselessness in the face of the game’s final dream sequence, in which Harry DuBois’ brain torments itself for the hundredth time with the moment that she left him. “The first death is in the heart,” Dora/Dolores tells Harry, not without kindness, as the game’s various skills all chime in with useless plans to win back a woman who’s already several years gone. Harry can’t even preserve his dignity and walk away; his Volition, the skill that spends the entire game trying to keep the player from indulging in needless self-destruction, simply isn’t strong enough. “I want the exact same bad things you want,” it whispers. “Real darkness has love for a face,” Dora tells him in turn, sweetly twisting the knife, before reminding him that once this dream starts, it tends to keep happening, several nights a week. She walks out of his life forever, again, her final words more chilling than any number of criminal confessions or murderous rants: “See you tomorrow.”
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