Kaichu: The Kaiju Dating Sim

Kaichu – The Kaiju Dating Sim reinforces what makes the genre delightful. Its ingenuity is perfect for those who love looking through their Steam queue and finding a ridiculous-sounding title to sink a few hours into, and the price pretty much seals the deal. Although this casual, wholesome experience swings very, very far into the “casual” side of things, it is still a good time, especially for those who seek novelty. If you’re ready to look for love in all the tall places, Kaichu – The Kaiju Dating Sim has a gigantic pink protagonist who gives monster hugs and kisses.

Despite its whimsical art and wholesome message, Kaichu was unable to capture my heart. While it certainly killed some time, I feel it's time to go our separate ways.

Love is in the air in this cute, personality-quiz-filled experience that is Kaichu: The Kaiju Dating Sim.

I guess calling Kaichu a bad game wouldn’t be entirely accurate. It looks nice and performs fairly well. But it just doesn’t do enough. A single playthrough takes roughly 30 minutes and even then it starts to feel a little samey towards the end. Kaichu is simply lacks depth. Quite frankly, I even struggled to find things to write about for this review.

Kaichu: The Kaiju Dating Sim is a dating sim parody that tries to make jokes about relationships and gender itself. However, its superficiality and little understanding of what really makes a dating sim interesting considerably compromise the experience, which ends up being worth no more than a quick playthrough.

Kaichu is a sweet experience that is well worth its time, but it’s also a game where players must temper their expectations, as it stays committed to its premise without any deviations.

A modest Kickstarter success, this was never pitched to be a massive, huge game. Even still, it's not something I'd recommend to the majority of people. Unless you're really into the idea of a kaiju dating sim that is actually just a set of trial-and-error multiple choice quizzes with nice animation, there's no reason to take Gigachu on a world tour of destructive dates.

Kaichu – A Kaiju Dating Sim could have easily been bland, but it’s not (despite the lack of oomph to the relationships). The game is adorable, funny, and relatable on a personal level. I quite like the way the entire dating experience is framed by the reporters, it was an incredibly creative way to link the dates to each other as well as to deliver a little bit of narrative to go along with the dating experience. The dating pool is quite varied, with someone for everyone… well, hopefully. You never know with love, do you?

So, you know, it's the dating game involving huge monsters destroying cities on dates, yeah...

Kaichu: The Kaiju Dating Sim is inventive in its proposal, but it turns out to be a better in paper. With functional but shallow mechanics, story, and visuals, the game has very little to offer other than curiosity about the topic and runs out of steam very quickly, before we even get attached to its friendly little monsters in love.