As soon as I heard about this game I rushed to add it to my wishlist and I bought it the day of release! I mean the premise here is absolute gold. A dating sim murder mystery where any of the romance options could be the killer. Also there’s over 50 different endings! All of this randomness guarantees that your playthrough and experience will be vastly different to anyone else so I figured that I should share my experience for my first playthrough with all of you.
The game is structured by having 4 different romance routes. The game randomly decides at the beginning who the killer will be out of those 4 and you get to choose who you’ll spend time with and eventually romance, keeping your fingers crossed that they won’t be the murderer. Your 4 options are Edwin, your best friend who is desperate to protect you from the killer. Natasha, a girl who at one point was on the same swim team as the killer’s victims. Singh, the lead detective on the case (He’s the hottest one) and Fawn, Singh’s assistant who runs a true crime blog on the side (OMG I have a blog too).
I romanced Edwin first and I’m glad I started with him because I had a lot of fun but I don’t think I would have if I left him until later. In this route he was very sweet and cute. We went ice skating and had a movie date where we finally kissed. I was kicking my feet but then he gets arrested because DNA evidence has been discovered that puts him at the scene of the crime! Edwin fights back saying that he has no motive but detective Singh provides one saying that this was all manipulation to get closer to me… that’s kinda stupid. The game does seem to recognise this however as it allows me to essentially say that to the detective. It doesn’t convince him however and he takes my new boyf away with me crying that I’ll do anything to prove his innocence! That’s it. That’s the ending I got. I knew that with so many endings that some would feel underwhelming but this feels like a whole third act of the story is missing. We don’t even get to find out who the killer is! I unlocked an achievement for romancing an innocent Edwin so we know it’s not him and it’s probably not Natasha either since Singh and Fawn both work for the police so it would be a lot easier for them to frame poor little Edwin.
My second route was Dawn’s which had a much better ending. We actually got to see who the killer was! It was Edwin! He was stalking me and was killing out of jealousy. I’m getting ahead of myself. The romance itself wasn’t as cute as Edwin’s but it was still sweet. I got to see Fawn hyperfixate on her special interest of true crime and we got up to Scooby Doo shenanigans on our haunted house date! That led to her packing heat (hot) and killing a man (also hot). What this route lost in cuteness it more than made up for in thematic depth. This playthrough got me thinking about the structure of this game and how it suggests themes of how everyone has a dark side, since every romance option can end up a murderer. Dialogue in Dawn’s route supports this reading as she says “Assuming only certain people can be driven to murder is dangerous. Murderers aren’t always ‘abnormal’ people predisposed to be killers from the start. They’re often regular people like you and me. That’s why we need to understand criminal psychology, so that we understand why a ‘normal’ person might turn to murder”. Even Edwin being the killer supports these themes with the queer subtext behind him becoming jealous and enraged at me dating a woman instead of him. This is the full potential of this game. It’s a bunch of random elements (Me happening to choose Dawn on the playthrough where Edwin happens to be a killer and his motivation having a queer lens because I happen to be a man) but they’ve all come together to form a thematically strong narrative. It’s to the point where it resembles a traditional, not random, narrative that’s all been planned out. This route really reminds me of the movie that taught me what queer coding was, 1944’s Laura.
Laura is a film noir with a queer coded killer who projects himself onto the titular Laura. Guiding her through what she wears and who she gets to style her hair. He lives vicariously through her as the safest way to be a queer man at the time. When this is eventually threatened by her blossoming romances, this alongside a sense of jealousy fuels him to attempt to murder Laura in an attempt to salvage his medium of expression. There’s something cathartically tragic about this story. Waldo was denied his rights to self expression as a queer man in the 1940s so a violent outburst like this feels somewhat understandable in a this is just a B-movie fantasy sort of way. This route tickles the same itch. It’s not fair when you have a crush on a straight friend so the violence in this route as a rejection of that pain is similarly cathartic. More so it emboldens Dawn’s thematic concerns that people don’t become murderers because they’re predestined to, they do it because of their circumstances and experiences.
My third route was Singh’s and this is when I started noticing different things in the scenes I’d already played because of the themes introduced in the other routes. After an argument in the pool the player character Adrian thinks about some girl he knew in college who wanted to become an Olympic swimmer despite seeming quite unmotivated. Adrian’s narration comments that “you never know how people might change” this has grave implications when considering the game’s themes of everyone having a dark side. The killing scene itself reveals itself to be about the butterfly effect in this context. Adrian asks him why he didn’t do things slightly differently so he wouldn’t be in this situation. If he didn’t go to the pool that night or if he left earlier he wouldn’t be going through this traumatic experience. The same can likely be said for the killer. Small, seemingly insignificant changes in their lives could have put them on the path to becoming a killer. Getting to Singh’s actual route, it was so cute! We went on a coffee date to some nerdy D&D cafe where they call the coffees angel dust and he took me to a fancy restaurant and we went stargazing! I was kicking my feet the whole time! The hottest romance option also has the sweetest route. It helps that Singh doesn’t get super clingy and weird when you choose another route like Edwin does. Edwin was the killer again and came to rudely interrupt our stargazing date. This is why I said that I’m glad I dated Edwin first because I don’t think I would enjoy his route anywhere near as much now knowing how clingy he can be. This does showcase the weakness of the game’s structure and that’s how you can just be given the same killer everytime.
For my final route I finally got to see a different killer! Not just that but I got to date her! That being said Natasha herself is kind of dull. She’s easily the weakest romance option in the game. She hasn’t got much of a personality and starting her route feels kinda awkward. There’s just no real good reason to start talking to her outside of the context that she’s a romance route in a VN. That being said, I like how she has a bunch of weird interests. She likes cryptids like Bigfoot and The Dover Demon. She’s on the swimming team. She reads. It’s like a toned down, more realistic version of Fawn. Really Natasha feels the most like a real person out of all of the characters. Unfortunately her killer ending was a bit of a let down. Maybe it’s just that you don’t get an achievement for getting killer endings but I felt underwhelmed. We didn’t really get to see any motivation. She just knocks me out and escapes after confessing that it was her. She says she was hoping to divert suspicion by becoming my friend but we don’t get a motive for the initial murders. From what I’ve gathered from the route the most likely motive is jealousy that the swim team got to be a team of friends whilst she left the team to focus on a solo swimming career that wasn’t going anywhere. On the one hand it is a shame that I didn’t get to see Natasha’s motives but on the other it’s exciting that for me she’s such a mystery but for other players she could be the first killer they get in an ending where her motives are laid out and she could become the most iconic character in the game for them. The actual romance route was cute. We went on a bookshop date and we did therapy together. She even buys you a book, which had my feet kicking! My final route did reveal another one of the game’s weaknesses however. The route doesn’t actually change significantly if you’re dating the killer, it’s just the ending that is different. This is a shame for one because it waters down the theming since the characters aren’t actually shaped differently by their experiences which led them to kill. They’re just the same people with the only difference being that they’ve committed murder which doesn’t sit right with me. Having murderous thoughts, having the motivation to kill and actually going through with it would radically change a person.
Is this game perfect? Absolutely not. Did I have a blast playing it? Definitely. I’ve already gone back to do a few more routes (Which is why you didn’t get this post when the game was still brand new and relevant). I bought this game because of how ridiculously cool its premise sounded and it absolutely lived up to that premise. I think anyone with even a passing interest in visual novels should pick it up and let me know how their first playthrough went in the comments
– Mark
References:
Drops of Death (PC, 2025)
Laura (Preminger, 1944)
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