Picture this steamy scene. You’ve spent a long day down in the dungeon, hacking your way through kobolds and disarming the occasional trap. There’s treasure to be found, sure, but when you return to the surface world, what you really need is a warm meal and a cuddle. Thankfully, the sword you’ve been wielding all day just happens to polymorph into a dream date, so you can spend all that treasure on gifts and fine dining.

This is the newly announced Boyfriend Dungeon. A hack and slash (fic) game.



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It’s a concept as cute as it is weird, which is how I like my concepts. I’ve always bounced off dating sims because I don’t enjoy visual novels as a genre, and that’s the style they tend toward. Boyfriend Dungeon has procedural levels to potter about in, killing critters and rescuing new weapons, as well as collecting the sweet loot that will, in dating game fashion, presumably allow you to gift your way into your sword’s heart/pommel.

I’m also pleased to hear that there are a couple of excellent writers contributing their words, namely Christine Love and Meg Jayanth. You may know Love from Ladykiller in a Bind, or the earlier Digital: A Love Story and Analogue: A Hate Story. Jayanth was the writer of 80 Days, which is one of my favourite games in the whole wide world.

Boyfriend Dungeon springs from Kitfox, a studio with a small but eclectic back catalogue, including handsome roguelike Shattered Planet and recent cult management sim The Shrouded Isle. Sword dating won’t commence until 2019 but you can find out more on the official website. In the meantime, I absolutely do not recommend that you check out the very NSFW Oglaf for more dungeon-crawling and sword swallowing of the saucy variety.