Video games often get reduced to simple power fantasies of chaos and violence. But they can also serve as a lot of, ahem, other fantasies, as even the quickest, most “Mom, don’t look” perusal of the various “horny solitaire” games clogging up basically every online gaming storefront on the planet these days can make abundantly clear. When it comes to actual romance, and not just titillation, though, the options for console love can often be surprisingly pedestrian. (For a definition of “pedestrian” that involves seducing a lot of elves, anthropomorphized animals, and a whole bestiary’s worth of amorous aliens and monsters, at least.)
But never fear, those of you hoping to put the largest pan possible in your gaming pansexuality: There’s still a very big buffet of unconventional romantic partners out there to choose from. And so, in celebration of the beauty of love in all its many, sometimes very tentacle-heavy forms, we offer up this: A look at many of the weirdest things, creatures, and concepts that video games have let their players date over the years
The whole Earth, E.V.O. Search For Eden
Enix’s cult classic action-RPG doesn’t act shy about the prize awaiting players at the end of their million-year odyssey to evolve into the ultimate lifeform (i.e., some kind of funky wooly-mammoth creature with a really good bite strength). That is, a chance to serve as the “immortal partner” of Gaia, the embodiment of the Earth itself. (Who seems nice enough, if you don’t mind the daily maintenance required for a lady who has the entire planet’s oceans for her hair.) E.V.O. doesn’t put much emphasis on the actual wooing of an entire planet—although you could argue that your embrace of the principles of evolution to grow more powerful across the game’s multiple eras is a cosmic riff on taking the time to make yourself properly presentable for a big date. But the game does end on another stock romantic comedy trope: A nasty conflict with your global beau’s aggressive ex, as you’re forced to take on a gigantic single-celled organism that’s been dumped on account of losing the genetic rat race, and has decided to take Gaia by force.
Some sort of horrifying meat-fungus abomination, Saya No Uta There are a surprising number of games these days that let you date Lovecraftian monstrosities, as the modern internet’s collective love of dating sims, irony, and unknowable cosmic horrors have collided in bursts of cuteness like 2022’s Cthulhu-dating simulator Sucker For Love. Saya No Uta is a beast of an entirely different color out of space, though: Originally released in 2003, Gen Urobuchi’s visual novel centers on a young man whose experimental brain surgery causes him to see his fellow humans as grotesque wads of groaning meat. (Think a wetter, more disgusting Anomalisa.) When he meets a young woman who somehow doesn’t trigger his delusions… Well, suffice it to say that everyone else who ends up seeing young Saya ends up going screaming, claw-your-eyes-out-of-your-head mad, even as Fuminori couldn’t be happier. An often violently dark, sexually explicit meditation on the madness at the heart of love, Saya No Uta isn’t for the faint of heart—but hey: If you’re some sort of grotesque spore-spreading meat creature, maybe it’s aspirational, instead!
A sex robot named F.I.S.T.O., Fallout: New Vegas
It might be stretching things a little far—no pun intended—to include the optional encounter between Fallout: New Vegas’ Courier protagonist and the reprogrammed “Fully Integrated Security Technetronic Officer” he procures for a Vegas sleaze merchant in one of the game’s sidequests on this list. (The entire encounter doesn’t last much longer than a robotic “Please assume the position,” and technically still counts as a “tasteful” fade to black.) Still, F.I.S.T.O. and its romantic wiles have managed to find a second life for themselves in recent years: Popping up in the second season of the Fallout TV show, where the converted robot is the object of the surprisingly perilous romantic questing of a sketchy snake oil salesman played by comedian Jon Daly. If love isn’t crossing 270 miles of radroach-infested desert to bring a fusion core back to your special sexbot, what is, huh? And for those who like keeping their bizarre romantic assignations closer to home, New Vegas’ Old World Blues DLC has you covered, too: What other game lets you attempt to flirt your own surgically removed brain back into your skull?
A Dark Elf sadist, Warhammer 40,000: Rogue Trader It says something about the content of this list that Marazhai Aezyrraesh, space elf torture pervert, might be the most conventional entry to appear on it. After all, Warhammer 40K’s Drukhari were pretty clearly designed with kinksters in mind—even if there’s nothing even remotely caring, communicative, or consent-minded about a whole species of fallen elves who have to perform acts of cruelty to stop their souls from getting eaten by the psychotic god they helped birth. Even among that ilk, though, Marazhai is an especially sick, if charming, fuck: Owlcat Games’ Rogue Trader allows its titular players—whose role makes them a sort of roving planetary government all their own—to get away with a lot of what the Imperium Of Man would call “heretical” behavior. But romancing Marazhai, who you meet as he’s capturing you so that he can throw you into his homeworld’s torture pits, and who will only “date” players who can keep pace with his own murderous sadism, is still pushing a Rogue Trader’s considerable authority to its limits. (Amazingly, truly dedicated players can even go too far for him; casually murdering crew members is one thing, but worshiping the setting’s foul Chaos Gods? Red flag, baby.)
One of two long-dead women, Quest For Glory 4 and 5 Katrina and Erana, two of the love interests the player character can marry in the grand finale of Sierra’s long-running adventure-RPG series Quest For Glory, aren’t all that unique in and of themselves. (Sure, one’s an elven wizard with a penchant for peace, while the other is a vengeful vampire master of magic, but that’s the fantasy dating equivalent of “enjoys movies, and people who are nice to dogs.”) The trick here is that you meet both of these eligible (?) ladies after they’re long dead, over the course of franchise highlight Quest For Glory 4: Shadows Of Darkness. Sure, Katrina is still up and moving, courtesy of her undead status—at least until the game’s conclusion, when she sacrifices herself to save the series’ hero from a sudden betrayal. But Erana is dead dead, appearing only in dreams received when the player sleeps near the magical staff she left behind in a curse-damned village. Luckily (at least for one of them), Quest For Glory 5’s Silmeriais situated conveniently close to a mouth of hell, allowing the player to Orpheus their way into the Underworld to bring one of his potential paramours back to life.
The ship from Galaga, Namco High
Written by webcomics star Andrew Hussie—and featuring characters from Hussie’s own ludicrously influential Homestuck,mixed in with an array of unlikely suspects drawn from the likes of Mappy, Mr. Driller, and Time Crisis—Namco’s Namco High was always going to be steeped in meta-references and irony. But it might save its weirdest gag for the decision to let players (portraying one of the oddball Cousins from Katamari Damacy) strike up a romance with a sentient space ship from the company’s 1981 coin-gobbler Galaga. The joke being that the Galaga ship’s plotline is, if anything, more prosaic than those romances with members of the student body who have actual student bodies: Turns out that even spacecraft largely concerned with shooting down space bugs and collecting a second ship to amplify their firepower can get self-conscious when everyone becomes too fixated on their beautiful hull to see the real, vulnerable person within. (And if vertical shooters aren’t your jam, never fear: You can always ditch the spaceship and romance the sentient drum from Taiko Drum Master instead.)
A mindflayer, Baldur’s Gate 3
You could probably fill a whole list like this with entries pulled from Larian Studios’ Baldur’s Gate 3. The weird drow twin sex workers? The horny lickable spider meat? The thing with the bear? But the wildest thing about getting down with The Emperor—the arguably “good” member of the brain-sucking illithid race who’s eventually revealed to have been shepherding your party throughout the game’s three acts—is that, unlike some instances of shocking drive-by sexuality in Larian’s game, it really can serve as the culmination of a deeply meaningful game-long relationship. Sure, it takes a pretty long time for the tentacled schemer to pick up what you’re putting down, but for those players who see something noble in the creature—who, unlike most of his fellow mindflayers, is free of the influence of his kind’s extra-malevolent overlords—giving themselves over to his wriggly passion is the culmination of that bond. (On the other hand, turning down the sexy shirtless squid man has its own benefits—notably, watching the sense of rejection piss him off so much that he drops the mask of civility he’s been putting forward all game, revealing that even a “good” mindflayer is still an inveterate manipulator at its core.)
Photorealistic birds, Hatoful Boyfriend
If you ignore the bird part, the cast of Hato Moa’s wildly popular dating sim parody Hatoful Boyfriend could pop up in any number of the games it’s mocking—both with its initial dose of light-hearted high school hijinks, and its sudden, apparently de rigeur pivot to Serious Drama and horror. Except, again, for the bird thing. Which is to say, the fact that all of the high school class presidents, wistful brooding boys, good-hearted charmers, etc. that your character dates over the course of Hatoful’s story are pigeons. And not even cute anime pigeons: These are bird-ass birds, represented in game by actual photos of real breeds of pigeon. And while the game does include, as an apparent sop to those who need a tiny dollop of eye candy to function, the ability to briefly see pictures of what its characters might look like were they pretty anime boys (and not pigeons), the game also never lets you forget: They’re pigeons. (Also, you’d better date at least one, or agents of the right-wing militaristic pigeon government will murder you. Hatoful Boyfriend: It’s the one where you date pigeons, or you die.)
Everything in your house, Date Everything!
It’s really right there in the name: Sassy Chap’s 2025 dating sim runs off of, gleefully embraces, and ultimately explores to a depth of something like 1.2 million words, the premise of players being able to have conversations and romance with basically every object, and even concept, lurking in their homes. (Have you ever wanted to flirt with your own sense of existential dread? This is the game for you.) It’s a universe that answers many questions you hadn’t even thought to think to ask. Like, do you want to navigate the complicated relationship dynamics lingering between a laundry hamper and a pile of dirty clothes? Form a meaningful connection with a bag of sex toys originally given to you as a gag gift? Kiss a toaster without running the risk of serious electrical shock? Less immediately dangerous than the similar Boyfriend Dungeon—where you’re also romancing anthropomorphic personifications of objects, but specifically of very sharp ones—it’s the ultimate dream for anyone who’s ever looked at a rat trap and thought, “Hm, why not?’
Enix’s cult classic action-RPG doesn’t act shy about the prize awaiting players at the end of their million-year odyssey to evolve into the ultimate lifeform (i.e., some kind of funky wooly-mammoth creature with a really good bite strength). That is, a chance to serve as the “immortal partner” of Gaia, the embodiment of the Earth itself. (Who seems nice enough, if you don’t mind the daily maintenance required for a lady who has the entire planet’s oceans for her hair.) E.V.O. doesn’t put much emphasis on the actual wooing of an entire planet—although you could argue that your embrace of the principles of evolution to grow more powerful across the game’s multiple eras is a cosmic riff on taking the time to make yourself properly presentable for a big date. But the game does end on another stock romantic comedy trope: A nasty conflict with your global beau’s aggressive ex, as you’re forced to take on a gigantic single-celled organism that’s been dumped on account of losing the genetic rat race, and has decided to take Gaia by force. 
It might be stretching things a little far—no pun intended—to include the optional encounter between Fallout: New Vegas’ Courier protagonist and the reprogrammed “Fully Integrated Security Technetronic Officer” he procures for a Vegas sleaze merchant in one of the game’s sidequests on this list. (The entire encounter doesn’t last much longer than a robotic “Please assume the position,” and technically still counts as a “tasteful” fade to black.) Still, F.I.S.T.O. and its romantic wiles have managed to find a second life for themselves in recent years: Popping up in the second season of the Fallout TV show, where the converted robot is the object of the surprisingly perilous romantic questing of a sketchy snake oil salesman played by comedian Jon Daly. If love isn’t crossing 270 miles of radroach-infested desert to bring a fusion core back to your special sexbot, what is, huh? And for those who like keeping their bizarre romantic assignations closer to home, New Vegas’ Old World Blues DLC has you covered, too: What other game lets you attempt to flirt your own surgically removed brain back into your skull?
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