Love Sucks: Night Two is a horny game where the real fantasy isn't sex, it's enjoying a carnival without almost immediately getting tired and wanting to go home

A kissing booth and a pumpkin-carving tent at a fair

(Image credit: Critical Bliss)

I made my peace with linear visual novels a while ago—as long as there's at least a little interaction. Let me muck around in a scene deciding what I look at while being rewarded with some ambient dialogue or whatever before I get back on the train to Plot Town, and I'm happy. That's the kind of game Love Sucks: Night One was. You might have enjoyed the illusion you were steering it at times, but really it was a ride you were on and even if you leaned into the corners, you still got off at the same place. I mean "got off" literally, because the Love Sucks series sure are horny.

Each game in the series—a planned trilogy—is about surviving a single night. A college student in the Sunnydale-adjacent monster-haunted town of Crescent Valley, you're on a dangerous double date with a vampire and a succubus and, just like a stereotypical college boy, you will absolutely risk your life for even a sniff of a chance of getting laid. You're helped in this boner-headed endeavor by a magic sigil that bounces you back in time if your dates murder you before midnight. Which they might do by accident, because just like you they cannot keep their desires in check.

A succubus and a vampire reveal their true forms — (Image credit: Critical Bliss)

The real fantasy of Love Sucks: Night Two isn't the sex, though. It's spending all night at a carnival without needing a nap. The dream of being able to ride the ferris wheel, walk down the midway eating something off a stick, play the shooting gallery, visit the arcade, hell, even the bit where you stop in at the student fair and one of your friends is running a one-shot introductory RPG session—squeezing all this into a single night is as much fantasy as the threesome.

The magical timeloop helps. Night Two is most noticeably less linear than Night One when you find out how many optional scenes play out in different ways on the second go-around. You can try your hand at the rhythm game in the arcade or pumpkin-carving at the craft stall, throw yourself at Jan the vampire's fangs to reset back to a "save point", then do it again and again on subsequent loops, getting better each time.

The reason you might want to do that, apart from natural competitiveness and a desire to Unlock Every Scene, is that you've got a secret series of runes to activate that might save you from becoming a ritual sacrifice. Those runes are activated by peak experiences: everything from "triumph over a rival" to "help with a secret desire" or straight-up "have anal sex" counts as a rune, and the more you cross off the list the better. It's like achievements, only for things your children will never believe you did.

A strength-testing game and other booths at a carnival — (Image credit: Critical Bliss)

Love Sucks is about sex and death. It balances Eros and Thanatos as explicitly as Hades, but with less Greek myth and more Buffy the Vampire Slayer and anime. Is it worth having the blood and vitality drained out of your body for a chance of getting laid? Well, no, but it's a funnier story if the main character acts like it is. And having a social life would be more fun if you could Groundhog Day your way into visiting every single part of a carnival multiple times until you were some kind of unstoppable festival wizard.

Love Sucks: Night Two is available on Steam.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.