Thirsty Suitors

Thirsty Suitors opens with a blunt premise: Jala is coming home, and everyone she's wronged is waiting for her. Outerloop Games and publisher Annapurna Interactive built a "breakup simulator" around that idea — turn-based RPG battles against a string of named exes, skateboarding traversal through a small open neighbourhood, and competitive cooking sequences with Jala's family, all wrapped around a story about a queer South Asian woman reckoning with who she's hurt and why. It landed 2 November 2023 with no Early Access period behind it, and 248 Steam reviews since have settled at a Very Positive 97.2% — a figure that hasn't drifted with time, since 95 of the last 100 English reviews are positive too. What makes this corpus worth reading closely isn't the score; it's how small and how consistent the dissent is.

A tiny negative sample that agrees with itself

Only 7 English-language negative reviews exist for this game, and every one of them is substantive rather than a driveby. Read them together and two specific complaints repeat, independent of each other: skateboarding is clunky, and turn-based combat wears thin. The most detailed negative — 48 votes, from a reviewer who says they originally posted a positive review before changing their mind — lays it out precisely: "the skating is clunky and feels unresponsive, that mixed with very tight time limits makes getting S rank on challenges a grindey nightmare," and separately, that combat "based around quick time events... ends up being really slow" once the novelty of the mechanic wears off. A second detailed negative, after beating the game in under 10 hours, calls the combat "the same quick time events for every move" that "repeat a lot," while still praising the same boss fights as "a pretty refreshing take on the turn based RPG genre" earlier in the same review — the corpus arguing with itself inside single reviews as often as between them.

The achievement data backs the skating half of that complaint up cleanly. 52.7% of players have completed at least one skate challenge, but only 5.1% have completed every one, and just 6.8% have landed a million-point combo — a much steeper drop-off than the story-gated boss achievements nearby (78.6% for the first boss, 42.8% for the fourth). Cooking, by contrast, holds up: two cooking-specific achievements sit at 61.5% and 58.9% completion, among the highest in the whole list, suggesting that minigame is genuinely more approachable than the skating one players complain about.

What almost nobody disputes

Strip out the two mechanical complaints and the corpus is close to unanimous. Writing, art direction and the soundtrack draw praise from positive and negative reviewers alike — even the harshest detailed negative opens by calling the "story, dialogue, art, music... top tier." Boss battles specifically, where combat and story intersect, are the most consistently named highlight: reviewers repeatedly single them out as the moments the systems and the writing work together rather than in spite of each other. And the premise itself — Jala's specific cultural and family context, her queerness, the fact that this is explicitly not a dating sim but its inverse — is credited by multiple reviewers with offering something they say they hadn't gotten from a game before. "I'm a straight cis white male," reads one 42-vote positive, going on to list every reason the game shouldn't have worked for them and then explaining why it did anyway.

The one real crack in an otherwise strong story reception is the ending. Several detailed reviews, including ones scoring the game highly overall, describe the final act as rushed, introducing a late character with too little room to matter and leaving relationship threads with the titular suitors unresolved. It's a specific, recurring note rather than a universal one, but it shows up often enough across otherwise-glowing reviews to be worth flagging directly to anyone going in for the story above all else.

Final verdict

Thirsty Suitors is a game whose ambition — three distinct minigame systems in service of a specific, personal story — mostly pays off, and its own small negative corpus makes an unusually clean case for exactly where it doesn't: skating that punishes precision the controls can't reliably deliver, and combat that leans on repetition once its novelty fades. Neither undermines what the game is actually selling, which is the writing, the art and a small handful of boss fights that use the mechanics to say something. Go in for the story, tolerate the skating, and don't expect the ending to tie every thread off.