Sucker for Love: Crush Landing

Akabaka's Sucker for Love series has built a devoted following on a simple pitch: dating cosmic horrors, played mostly straight but with a wicked sense of humour. Crush Landing, the third mainline entry, keeps the humour and the horror but changes almost everything else about how the game plays, swapping the series' signature rituals for a resource-feeding puzzle loosely built around H.P. Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space." It's the most visually accomplished Sucker for Love game yet, and it finds a genuinely fresh angle for the series to explore. It's also, according to a large share of its own longtime audience, the weakest and shortest entry to date, and one whose puzzle design leans on luck in ways the earlier games mostly avoided.

A new direction, confidently told

The premise is a departure from the series' dating-focused structure. A meteorite crashes into the apartment of the game's protagonist, "Dude," and turns out to be alive: a glowing, cosmic entity named Hheily (after Halley's Comet) whose light draws people in only to consume them on contact. Rather than pursuing dates, the player spends each of three timed rounds feeding Hheily colour-coded objects scavenged from around the apartment, trying to keep every colour star filled without accidentally sacrificing a living thing and turning a star into a broken heart instead. Reviewers who came to the game fresh, without prior series baggage, describe it warmly — one newcomer called it "an absolute joy" and praised the pacing of a single run, the voice acting, and the way side characters get fleshed out through the game's various random encounters.

The presentation draws consistent praise across nearly every review in the sample, critical or not. The CRT-filtered, early-90s anime visual style is described as the best the series has looked, and the voice cast — including Brianna Knickerbocker as Hheily and a small cameo from VTuber Haakos Baelz — is singled out repeatedly for strong performances. The narrative hook, drawing explicitly on Lovecraft's "The Colour Out of Space" and the lesser-known Clark Ashton Smith stories that inspired parts of it, gives the game a distinct identity that several reviewers say enriches the experience for anyone with a passing interest in Weird Tales-era horror fiction, cosmic entity and all.

A puzzle built on luck, not planning

Where Crush Landing loses its harshest critics is in how that central feeding puzzle actually plays out. Multiple detailed reviews describe the item pool as too randomised to plan around: certain colours are consistently easy to source, while others depend on random NPC encounters or door-knock events that may or may not offer the specific colour needed, sometimes forcing a reload from an earlier save once a run becomes unwinnable through no player error. One reviewer summarised it bluntly as "bruteforcing the order of operations," and another, a self-described longtime fan of the series, called the loop "annoying" for exactly this reason, contrasting it unfavourably with the more deliberate ritual-based puzzles of the previous two games. A developer patch is reported to have improved some of the worst offenders since launch, but the underlying reliance on random item drops for a puzzle that punishes wasted turns remains a structural complaint rather than a bug.

Character and story depth take a hit as well, according to fans of the earlier entries. Hheily herself draws mixed reactions — some reviewers find her innocent, endearing design a highlight, while others feel she's given comparatively little personality beyond wanting closeness with Dude. The protagonist draws much sharper criticism: several long-form reviews describe him as actively unlikeable, a womaniser who shows little remorse for the harm his choices cause until the plot forces a reckoning near the end, which a number of reviewers say undercuts the emotional investment the series usually earns. Side characters, while more numerous than in previous entries, are generally described as getting only one or two scenes each, a mile-wide-inch-deep trade-off compared to the tighter casts of "First Date" and "A Date to Die For."

Short, and priced like it isn't

Length and value are the most consistent practical complaint. Several reviewers report finishing a base route in as little as 60 to 90 minutes, a sharp drop from earlier entries, and at least one detailed critical review notes that despite this it is currently the most expensive game in the series to date. Fifteen available endings do extend playtime for players chasing full completion, and the new manual save/load system — a genuine, widely appreciated improvement over the more limited checkpointing in "A Date to Die For" — makes hunting for those endings considerably less frustrating than it might otherwise be. But without a dialogue history or a selective skip option, some reviewers report accidentally fast-forwarding past new content they didn't realise they hadn't seen before, undermining some of that replay value in practice.

Final Verdict

Sucker for Love: Crush Landing is a genuinely handsome, well-acted, and narratively ambitious entry that takes real risks with the series' formula, and newcomers with no attachment to the earlier games' rituals-and-dating structure are likely to have a good time with it. But it arrives shorter and pricier than its predecessors, built around a puzzle that leans on luck more than skill, and fronted by a protagonist that a significant portion of the game's own fanbase actively dislikes. It's worth playing, but go in expecting the series' most divisive entry rather than its best.