When Boyfriend Dungeon dropped onto Xbox Game Pass, I downloaded it for its Hades-like dungeon crawling, and the obvious embrace of queerness, nothing more. Dating sims aren’t typically my scene. Once I started though, I was enthralled by visual novel elements that normally don’t grip me. More importantly, I was surprised to find that Boyfriend Dungeon let you do much more than its name suggests, and hides a true haven for bisexual players.
You arrive in town to meet your cousin Jesse whose goal is to help you gain some semblance of confidence in the coming months. He does so by setting you up on dates, making you confront your fears, or just helping you forge platonic friendships with people in town. You can be gay, bi, ace, whatever, and can go by he/him, she/her, or they/them – the best part is that none of these choices limit your romatic options. Boyfriend Dungeon is a queer free-for-all that is delightfully seamless, depicting the ups and downs of LGBTQ+ life in a way that emphasise its normality, rather than splashing it with child-like rainbows or coating it in needless tragedy.
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One of the first people you meet is the suave no-nonsense financier Isaac, a young but stern man who wears a suit with a white shirt slightly unbuttoned. This is completely juxtaposed when you meet Sunder, a club owner who wears a leather jacket with no shirt underneath, exposing his muscular chest and abs – he has long unkempt hair and some rugged stubble. He ain’t my type and he texts like an old man who doesn’t care so I never really bothered, but then you meet Valeria, the wonderfully accepting street art guru that has an untamed past ready to explore. There’s someone for everyone, and for us bisexuals, the game is filled with brilliant choices across the gender spectrum – just whatever you do, stay away from Eric.
The game gives you a whole host of people to flirt and build bonds with. It’s not done through arbitrary karmic choices as in an RPG or moral affiliations. The more you use them in the dungeons – oh yeah, they all turn into weapons – the more your bond with them develops, and the more dates you can go on. Weapon transformation aside, this is like real life. The more you spend time with a person, the more you get to connect with them. You can learn an awful lot about the person you’re falling for, but, at any moment, you can opt out.
I’ve never felt so represented in a game before because this choice lends itself to being a bisexual in the narrative. I’m stepping into the shoes of the protagonist, able to text, flirt with, and date anyone of my choosing regardless of gender, but it isn’t just a completely open canvas for choice – it is queer.
Whenever I get to ‘be bisexual’ in a game, it rarely feels authentic. It tends to feel like an underhanded way to appease everyone in the LGBTQ+ space, like the shareholders are saying, “Hey, look, you can fuck men and women! Come buy our game.” That’s not really enough. There’s more to sexuality than who you bed, and that’s what Boyfriend Dungeon nails. It’s primarily about the intimate moments of dialogue between you, the dates, and the trust you place in one another. It’s far more than who you’re boning which is nice to see when bisexuality is so often boiled down to promiscuity. The romances in Boyfriend Dungeon don’t feel like they’re initially hetero with the odd pronoun change in dialogue to appease LGBTQ+ players. It feels like every moment has been carefully designed to cater to a whole host of queer players.
You can still play through it as a cis heterosexual – that’s not off the table. The ‘love’ meter isn’t inherently romantic (which is what also lends itself to asexual representation). The cat – also a weapon – you meet really hammers that point home. The love meter doesn’t exactly mean you want to bone a kitten, just that the two of you have formed a strong bond. So if you want to use the estoc (Isaac) as a man in combat but don’t wanna be gay, you can. It’s so open and fluid in its romantic storytelling and that serves to make its world feel tangible, like a bunch of strangers becoming good buds by the end of the trip and, if you’re lucky, maybe something more.
What’s refreshing about Boyfriend Dungeon’s approach is that it isn’t a playersexual game. The characters can all be romanced regardless of your gender, but Kitfox Games has taken care to include bisexuality as part of its storytelling, not just the story the player writes. Valeria was in a polyamorous relationship with a man and a woman long before you met. Not only will she date you regardless of your gender identity, the writers have consciously made her more than playersexual.
It’s incredibly rare for that to happen. Bisexuality is often something that’s supposedly present in triple-A games but it usually boils down to little more than a character being okay sleeping with you regardless of how you identify. It is rarely explored in a nuanced way. Just look at Dragon Age 2’s Anders or Fallout 4’s many followers that are there to pad your skill tree. Valeria isn’t promiscuous, she isn’t attracted to everyone that she meets, she isn’t ‘greedy’ – she isn’t a stereotype and she isn’t a blank canvas for the player to paint. She fell for two people prior to your involvement and had a poetically romantic career with them as illegal street artists. When it fell apart, she moved into a quaint art studio until one day, she met you.
That understanding of bisexuality and presentation of it is unfortunately rare. While the industry moves to include better queer stories, bisexuality is often left behind, waved away with the option of playersexuality or not even using the term – “Princes and princesses” in Loki stung. It’s why Boyfriend Dungeon meant a whole lot to me and it’s probably why I ended up clinging to Valeria over Isaac. I wanted to see how this tale panned out, finding out more about her polyamorous history where she was indiscriminate about who she was with. It didn’t disappoint. None of the queer narratives of Boyfriend Dungeons did.
Next: Queer Stories Are Complicated, And Gaming Needs To Show That
