If you're like me and you're addicted to keeping track of the unfiltered new releases page on Steam, you would have noticed the FMV genre is experiencing a renaissance. I'm not talking about Her Story, or The Bunker, or Late Shift: the most recent wave is coming pretty much entirely from Asia, spanning China, Japan, Korea and Singapore.
There are seriously a lot of these: in the second half of 2025 alone we've had Heartbeat in Thailand, Such a Guy, Road to Empress, and Love Begins With Goodbye. Most are centred around romance and themed similarly to visual novels: you're a guy, there are a handful of women to talk to, and your choices determine which woman you'll end up hooking up with. Sometimes it's as simple as that: sometimes there's a bit of heart-pumping action involved.
At Gamescom Asia x Thailand Games Show last week I saw a game called Island of Hearts, which releases early next year and is ostensibly a "big deal" as far as these FMV dating sims games go. It's published by 4Divinity for one—a Singapore-based publisher with a growing profile in Asia. Secondly, it stars a gaggle of social media influencers with immense followings in Asia: Siew Pui Yi from Malaysia has over 24 million Instagram followers, for example, while Nahyun Kim from South Korea has 993k. Thirdly, it's one of the few—or perhaps the only—games from this new Asian FMV wave to have English dialogue.
Another factor contributing to its "big deal" aura—at least within this regional niche—is that it's developed by Singaporean company Titan Digital Media, which is a content and influencer empire founded by JianHao Tan, who himself is a content creator with over 10 million followers on YouTube. Titan Academy is one of Tan and the studio's biggest ongoing YouTube dramas.
I played the first chapter of Island of Hearts. It follows the adventures of a young man who has washed up on a mysterious island, but not just any old mysterious island: this is a luxurious resort populated by young women who are looking for love. The protagonist, though clearly confused by the whole "suddenly on an island" thing, takes this situation bravely in his stride.
There's a sort of safety involved, because you're not really in a real environment. It's not real dating, but you're dating in an almost kind of safe way.
This is not a subtle game, and Island of Hearts was definitely designed and filmed with men in mind. Conversations with the women are conducted in first-person, and my choices determine whether they consider me a match or not. But even if a character seems at odds with me, there's always the sense that they find me attractive.
Occasionally I'll have the chance to interact with a bunch of objects in a point 'n' click format, all the better to get to know a character. There was one mini-game where I had to hold my breath underwater via the dextrous clicking of bubbles. One of the women waded around in a bikini nearby, with the latter presumably designed to make concentrating on the former more difficult.
It's very straightforward stuff, with functional production and photography. It's not meant to be cerebral and the acting isn't brilliant, which is probably beside the point if you happen to be invested in the social media profiles of its influencer stars. Island of Hearts is unambiguously designed to titillate, but there's a subtle kind of self-awareness lurking beneath the saccharine, fantastical—kinda soft-porn—veneer.
"There's some partial truth to it," Vincent Sin, scriptwriter and assistant director on Island of Hearts, agrees on the matter of self-awareness. "The [FMV] games that I've played from China and Korea, I realise they're either completely funny or they're completely just straight-up romantic. We're trying to mix the levels. These kinds of scenarios don't usually happen, so let's go over the top. It's a soft tongue in cheek approach—not overly tongue in cheek, not breaking the fourth wall type. But it's almost there."
Love is all around
Keith Lui is the CEO of GCL, which is the parent company of publisher 4Divinity. He also noticed that the romance FMV market is trending dramatically up in 2025, especially in China and South Korea, and attributes it partially to the success of micro-dramas. These short form fictional videos are immensely popular in those markets, especially in China, via TikTok. TikTok may not have the level of interactivity of a videogame, but it's possible to comment, and it's certainly not as passive as watching a soap opera on television.
"We felt that the market really thrives on interactivity rather than just passive watching, and that's where I think the trend of continuing to want to watch live action, but with the additional layer of interactivity, brings that experience back to the fore," he said.
Sin agrees. "A lot of inspiration comes from these kinds of videos," he said. "In Singapore… We call it ragebait. You keep watching and you ask: Why is this happening? Why isn't it happening this [other] way? In a way, that's how we can get the replayability [in a game]: if you do something wrong, you can say no no no, I don't want that, I can go back."
But why are FMV dating sims, or just romance-themed FMVs, so popular in Asia at the moment? After all, FMV has had a smaller modern renaissance in the west which has since waned, and they were rarely romance-oriented.
"I think one of the games that did really well [among the new wave of Asian FMV games] features the male protagonists being surrounded by, or having to interact with a group of women," Lui said, who may or may not be referring to Love Is All Around. "I think, in a world where social activity is a little fragmented, and a lot more people are facing their screens, and interacting with people on screens, this genre is kind of akin to that. You're actually interacting with someone on the screen. It's not actually real life, but it feels like real life.
"There's a sort of safety involved, because you're not really in a real environment. It's not real dating, but you're dating in an almost kind of safe way."
Is it a salve for loneliness then? "I would say people with limited social interaction opportunities, or people who are introverted personality-wise, can be really shy," Lui said. "And they would never say the sort of things that they would say in a game, in real life, for example. But also, for example, if you look at AI and AI bots, you have all these AI bots that have now appeared where you interact with the AI bots as if they were your close friend or companion. You could ask the very same question: why are these AI bots so popular?"
Sin adds: "I would say people are into these kinds of games because they are more in control."
The comparison with AI bots comes at a time when multiple studies are identifying the risks of human-AI relationships, especially among teenagers. For that reason and countless others, FMV games are different to a generative AI chatbot that draws from an endless reservoir of human-created content. But, maybe people are drawn to both for the same reasons. And maybe the best reason among those is as simple as: because it's suddenly everywhere.
Island of Hearts releases on Steam in February 2026.
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