Love Too Easily ties hard, and I’ll give it props for tackling an enormously difficult genre for the video game medium: rom-coms are difficult in literature and cinema, and both of those mediums are far more nuanced for storytelling that extends beyond physical conflict. Unfortunately, Love Too Easily also highlights that video games have some growing up to do.
The concept is a cliché, but a charming enough one: You follow the story of a college-age girl who gets on the booze heavily one night at a party, has a make-out session with some guy, and then wakes up the next day having no idea who she smeared lipstick over. Worse, she accidentally took his phone with her and she has no idea how to get hers back. The rest of the plot focuses on her efforts to figure out what the hell happened that night and where her phone’s got to.
This immediately raises the question of why the guy she traded phones with doesn’t just immediately tell her when she next meets him. But I guess that would be a short story then…
The first problem that Love Too Easily faces is the coherence of the narrative. I really struggled to understand who Yuenwoo was throughout, let alone her potential suitors. It doesn’t help that the localisation is terrible and the often bordering on broken English undermines whatever characterisation the developers were aiming for. But a bigger problem is that she’s just an idiot, and that’s a generous take on her personality. Here’s a great example: In backtracking her steps from the drunken party, she ends up back at the bar, which for some reason is locked, but only from the inside. She lets herself in, gets locked in, and then proceeds to try and figure out an elaborate “escape room” puzzle to get back out.
Meanwhile one of the three potential suitors wanders in, they have a conversation, and then he announces that he’s leaving. “How?” Yuenwoo asks. As it turns out, through the open window.
Every moment of comedy and romance in Yuenwoo’s story seems to come down to her being a train-wreck airheaded human being. Having not seen that many Korean rom-coms, I can’t be totally sure if this is just reflective of the culture around this genre or not. There are some Japanese rom-coms that are similar, so perhaps, but this approach just isn’t for me. Sadly, because Yuenwoo is the kind of person who would annoy me in about five seconds flat in real lie, the “romance” side of the story was also largely lost on me, making it a struggle to want to play on to see which of the three men she hooks up with.
Unfortunately, the developers also decided to make Love Too Easily a video game via minigames and they are terrible and poorly related to the actual game. To go back to my earlier example, what bar has sliding block puzzles? I mean, that would be a genius way to keep patrons in and drinking, but I don’t think it happens in real life, and in the FMV side of Love Too Easy there are no magical, fantasy or adventurous elements. It’s a real-life-grounded rom-com so adventure game puzzles are a dissonant addition.
Other minigames actively fight with the story. One early example is that you need to go through the process of helping Yuenwoo do her makeup and dress for the day. Through this process, you get to choose from several different styles and aesthetics, and at least one of them is fairly daring. The actor playing Yuenwoo in the FMV side of the game is enormously attractive so admittedly I did try to choose that daring costume for her. Unfortunately, the game then told me “Yuenwoo would never wear this, you horrible person, to horny jail with you,” and chose Yuenwoo’s clothing for her.
I appreciate that it would have been incredibly laborious and impractical to shoot every FMV scene in multiple costumes, and the developers clearly had some kind of creative vision for what their protagonist needed to be, and that’s totally fine, but don’t give players interactive options if you’re not willing to let their decisions stand. That’s just basic game development wisdom, and none of the minigames are entertaining enough to make up for what they do to undermine the FMV side of the game.
The best thing I can say about Love Too Easy is that the cinematography is decent, though I’m not sure about the direction. The camera cuts tend to be quite jarring, and while an experimental art film might use them – Robert Eggers might use those kinds of camera cuts and angles to create the sense of unease that prevails in his films – for a rom-com you want the editing to be as backgrounded as possible. There are also moments where the footage gets extremely pixelated, as though you were playing a cloud game with a bad connection. I’m not sure what’s going on there given that I was playing the game off the Switch hard drive. I assume it has something to do with keeping the loading times snappy, as the pixelation tends to happen when moving to new scenes, and in fairness, the loading times are quite good. I think I prefer a second or two of fuzziness to sitting around and waiting for each scene to load.
I wanted to like Love Too Easily more than the game let me. There are a lot of good ideas and noble intent in there. It’s just let down by what I will put down to creative inexperience.
