Boyfriend Dungeon, Queer Romance, Stalking, and Internet Scandal

Tof Eklund, Contributing Editor

Kitfox Games' Boyfriend Dungeon is a dating sim/action roleplaying game where you fight rotary telephones and bat-winged VHS tapes in a mostly-vacant shopping mall, throw back boba tea to restore your health, and watch your weapons transform, Sailor Moon-style, into devastatingly attractive people. It doesn't sound like a game that would become the center of a controversy about how stalking, harassment, and abuse are represented in games, but, for good or ill, Boyfriend Dungeon is more than what it seems at first blush. 

Boyfriend Dungeon is about silly action and crushworthy characters, but it's also the most realistic dating-sim game I've played. Yes, despite the magical transformations and healing boba tea. It's not bleak or depressing, but neither is it the carefully-manicured fantasy space of a typical otome game (a dating sim whose primary audience is women). In Boyfriend Dungeon, you have to face rejection, work at relationships with people who have real-world hangups and traumas, and, in a move that was too real and too personal for some players, you will be harassed by a persistent stalker. Some of the game's audience were not just shocked, but deeply bothered by this. Kitfox responded promptly by updating the game's content warning. Originally, it said that the game "may include references to "stalking and manipulation"; the new warning clearly states that "this game's story involves exposure to" those themes.

I've been following Boyfriend Dungeon since it was first teased, and one of the most brilliant things about the publicity campaign for the game is the "love letters" that subscribers to the Kitfox Games mailing list have been treated to since the Kickstarter launched in 2018.Those letters revealed that the game's signature "bae blades" are much more complicated and well-developed than the typical range of stock characters in a dating sim. Years before the Boyfriend Dungeon was released, its characters had lives of their own, and it was clear that the game's emotional palette was broader than the silly, thirsty fun on it's brightly-coloured surface. That's where the trouble started.

Nothing in the game's promotional material, including dozens of love letters over more than three years, suggests that getting stalked is a major part of the plot. Players were shocked. Some previously-devoted fans called the game's presentation deceptive and hurtful, Kitfox was asked to remove the stalker from the game or make him optional, and the voice actor for the stalker received hate mail. To the best of my knowledge, there were no direct threats of violence, and no-one got doxxed or swatted. Journalists sprang to the game's defense, saying (correctly) that the stalker was essential to the game's plot and meaning, and that Boyfriend Dungeon was being held to a higher standard because it was an inclusive indie game. Some went on the offensive, saying that players have been spoiled by content tagging in fan fiction or that they should "go play any other game in the world" instead of requesting changes. 

I agree that the stalker is an essential part of Boyfriend Dungeon, but I also think that Kitfox, despite having the best of intentions, messed up. In trying to avoid spoilers, they accidentally hid the fact that the game revolves around a kind of trauma that a lot of people experience and some are deeply scarred by. People felt that they'd been promised a safe, fluffy, queer space, and that's not what Boyfriend Dungeon is about.

The tone of the game is set early on as a contrast between the excitement of meeting someone new (the bright, beautiful art captures this) and the much more complicated process of figuring out what a budding relationship is, navigating between what you want it to be and what it can be. One of my favorite moments comes early in the game, when you go on a date with a secondary character, Olivia, and she inevitably rejects you. The scene isn't pre-scripted: you have multiple decisions to make on that date and they're profoundly meaningful because they all lead to failure. WIth this once scene, Boyfriend Dungeon tells the player "it's not all about you," and drives the point home as you occasionally run across Olivia thereafter and interact normally: you're not lovers, you're not friends, you're not enemies, it's no big deal. That alone is enough to make Olivia one of my favourite characters: she's a normal person who doesn't have time for your shit, and you need to be okay with that.

If you take that understanding into the rest of the game, you'll be ready to support the game's love interests as complete people. You're there to support and encourage them, but it's not your job to fix their lives for them. Boyfriend Dungeon's love interests can turn into magic weapons and let you wield them, but they can't and won't turn into a flawless ideal partner, because that fantasy doesn't actually exist. This is exactly what the game’s stalker doesn't get, and it's part of why that character is both so important and so deeply troubling: he stalks you, but it's not about you. It's all about him, and about the fantasy he has of who you are and what you will do for him.

That's the dealbreaker for some people. Nothing else in the game is possibly worth having to deal with unwanted advances, invasions of privacy and even attempts at gaslighting every step of the way. The gaslighting, thankfully, is clumsy and lampshaded: if it had been too intense, I'd be one of the people saying, "I want to love it, but I can't play it."

That's the thing. I really do love Boyfriend Dungeon. The characters you meet are charming, complex, and messy, and the worldbuilding is subtle and clever. Both are layered, starting with a glossy surface and becoming more nuanced as you play. It's an enthusiastically queer game: you can change your appearance and pronouns (he, she, or they) whenever you like, date people who are often explicitly pansexual and sometimes explicitly polyamorous, and have fun in a world that makes an active effort to avoid cisheteronormative assumptions. "The dunj" is a nice adjunct to the game's relationship-sim heart, and the soundtrack is danceworthy. I've been waiting for this game for years, and it's totally worth it. It's just a shame that some other folks have been led-on by Boyfriend Dungeon for just as long, only to be disappointed. Let them mourn, they'll find love again someday.