Thirsty Suitors review: A healing, maximalist journey

Jala doesn’t go to bed without saying goodnight to her father. Jala joins her father on the sofa every night, after she backflips her jacket off and kicks her shoes off. She falls asleep listening to dad’s shows, Cold War documents and tapes of childhood basketball matches. Jala, who has spent years apart from her family and friends, allows herself to be a little more vulnerable in the presence of them. Jala’s father will carry her upstairs each evening after she falls asleep.

The Thirsty Suitors from Outerloop Games is a skateboarding, romance, cooking, and turn-based combat game — a baby Yakuza, as Outerloop Games co-founder and Thirsty Suitors Director Chandana Ekanayake explained it to Polygon. There are more to video games than the titles. The Thirsty Suitors is a game about “the fantasy of breaking cycles of generational trauma,” narrative designer Meghna Jayanth said. But it’s also about community-building and radical joy.

Image: Outerloop Games/Annapurna Interactive

“It’s not just about Black and brown trauma, right? There’s joy in the experience and fantasy of it, too,” Ekanayake said. Jayanth added: “The most radical thing that we’re doing here is allowing the protagonist to inhabit this queer, brown woman joyfully. It’s a sad thing that it’s still deeply unusual in the industry.”

The game begins as the player-character Jala returns home after years away; she left Timber Hills — some might say abandoned it — years back, leaving a stream of exes in her wake. Returning home means confronting the harm she’s created between herself and her community — family, friends, and everyone in between. Outerloop Games makes use of all the available resources. The Thirsty Suitors’ different activities to tell these stories, each tapping into an essential narrative line, whether that’s hard conversations while cooking or reconciliation during turn-based combat.

The Thirsty SuitorsThe mornings are dedicated to cooking. Cooking is a flashy but simple reflex minigame, where Jala runs through recipes, gaining points as she gains her parents’ approval. The cooking minigame creates new food items that are then used as stat boosters during battles. Once that’s done, she’ll typically receive a text or a call and head out into Timber Hills, either the town center or the skatepark. Skateboarding is Jala’s means of transportation, but it’s also its own minigame: The world is Jala’s skatepark, and she has a number of tricks that can be strung together in impressive combos.

While skateboarding, she’ll run into her exes, whom she “fights” in turn-based skirmishes that are almost akin to Pokémon battles — but instead of defeating your foe, you reconcile with them, at least on some level. Jala is flawed — like us all — and these battles are a way to work through the harm she’s caused. These interactions veer into the romance genre, where you’re able to do side quest-y dates with your exes after you reconcile, should you so choose.

A skatepark cult hums in the background of it all, along with a creepy bear mascot pulling the community’s youth into mysterious trouble. Somehow, Outerloop Games has pulled all of this “joyful abundance,” as Jayanth called it, into a 10-hour game.

“It starts with the theme and the story we wanted to tell,” Ekanayake said. “Everything else stemmed from there. Because many of the people on our team were remote, we knew that an immigrant’s story was what we would do. It’s made of a lot of immigrants, so that’s where we started.”

Outerloop Games’ developers knew they wanted The Thirsty SuitorsThe battle system was born. In South Asian culture cooking is also important. It’s a way to communicate in the game and it has ties with the battle system. “We were able to work on this for about three years,” Jayanth said. “We had an opportunity to figure out what the heart of the story was, what those themes were, and then play around with the narrative and mechanics and really iterate and have the time for that to develop.”

The Thirsty Suitors is very clearly a maximalist game, both in its visuals and mechanics, but there’s no shortage of sincerity tied up in there, too. For all the creative asskicking and kicklips, there are still quieter moments.

“You learn — it’s that feeling of being challenged and having accountability, and being OK and learning and growing and healing,” Jayanth said. “All of which I think are wonderful things for us right now in the world.”

Thirsty SuitorsThe game will be available on Nov. 2, 2018 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5, Windows PCs, Xbox One and Xbox Series X. Annapurna Interactive provided a code for a PC pre-release to review the game. Vox Media is affiliated with other companies. Vox Media earns commissions from affiliate products, although this doesn’t influence the editorial content. This is where you can find additional information about Polygon’s ethics policy here.