I’ve achieved many amazing feats in video games. I’ve stopped nuclear armageddon more times than I can count, stood triumphant over the slain bodies of humungous monsters, and single-handedly beaten back alien invasions. But Love Too Easily presented me with perhaps my most complex task yet: can I successfully run through the skincare, make-up, and wardrobe routine of a hungover Korean college student?
As it turns out, no, I can’t! Poor Yeunwoo has a lot going on in her life, including solving the mystery of who she drunkenly smooched last night, but she hasn’t contended with me stepping in as her personal stylist. As I finalized her daring new look (maaaaaybe a touch slutty but whatevs…), the game slammed the result as awful, helpfully generating a swarm of buzzing flies around poor Yeunwoo to really hammer the point home.
This was just one of the many moments in Love Too Easily that had me giggling. The overall conceit is that this is an interactive K-drama FMV romcom, in which party girl student Yeunwoo wakes up from a heavy night of drinking with a vague memory of smooching someone and must find out who. To make matters more complex, she’s accidentally swapped phones with them.
The opening moments of Love Too Easily, in which you wake up in a trashed bedroom festooned with dirty clothes, empty Soju bottles, and scattered make-up with little memory of how you got there, are remarkably Disco Elysium-coded. And, in true Disco style, the game gives you the option to be an absolute disaster of a human being. And, if a game offers me the chance to be a drama queen, I’m going to grab it with both hands.
As such, Yeunwoo under my control was a manic nightmare girl, choosing to approach all social interactions with maximum-level intensity and zero regard for social norms. This manifested as scattershot confessions of love, trying for more kisses at every available opportunity, and throwing out wild accusations without a shred of evidence behind them. Thankfully the game features many shots of your best friend reacting to your behavior with confused disgust, which is perhaps understandable when, in the middle of a chill breakfast, you’re suddenly emitting a series of ridiculous squeals at a confused boy while making a heart-shape with your hands.
There’s an argument you might get a bit more out of Love Too Easily by taking it seriously and not transforming Yeunwoo into a human wrecking ball. The core mystery relies on you deducing various clues, presenting evidence, and generally playing detective, but the overall tone is so lighthearted and the stakes so impossibly low that screwing around feels right. That’s bolstered also a satisfying sense of interactivity necessary for an FMV game to feel like a game, and a whole bunch of possible endings that take the story to some very weird places.
The live action scenes that make up most of the game are frequently interspersed with bizarre minigames. These range from a rhythm game to cook “Hangover Ramen” (to a very catchy song), moonlighting as a barista, scouring a messy bedroom for a vibrating phone, and even a fairly satisfying escape room puzzle sequence in which you accidentally get locked inside a pub. There’s even a brief 2D open-world sequence in which you’re trying to escape a lady stalker, which culminates in a Pokémon battle parody in which you can throw your books, shoes and make-up at them for massive damage.
I had a great time with Love Too Easily but, unfortunately, there’s more wrinkles to that praise than there are on Yeunwoo’s dirty laundry. Most glaring is that the translation is riddled with typos and garbled text, it’s frustrating that a single pass by an editor would have made the localization feel so much more professional. It’s also obvious that the game has been designed with mouse controls in mind and there’s been no effort to rework anything for controllers. This makes several of the minigames much more difficult, as you’re struggling with a virtual cursor rather than just being able to select things.
A little more subjective is that the acting isn’t going to win any Oscars. Dayu Jeong as Yeunwoo skates by on charisma alone, but none of three potential kissers displays much personality. It’s fun seeing these guys forced into being interchangable straightmen to Yeunwoo’s bizarre antics, but you won’t find yourself emotionally invested in hooking up with any of them.
Love Too Easily isn’t going to be winning any game of the year awards, but in a homogenous gaming landscape it sticks out like a sore thumb. It’s rough around the edges, sometimes unintentionally funny, and isn’t at all emotionally engaging. But – and this is a big but – I was smiling pretty much the entire time I played it, and that’s got to count for something.
Published: Dec 5, 2024 01:01 am