Thirsty Suitors is a story-driven RPG by Outerloop Games in which you play as Jala, a 25 year old who returns home to make amends for the crappy things she did before leaving three years ago.
Thirsty Suitors mixes turn-based combat with a quicktime event-fuelled cooking minigame and a mostly-optional skateboarding system complete with combos and tricks. It’s a strange blend of genres, but it’s all tied together by an excellent story and strong structure.
In each chapter of the game, you set out from your parents’ house with a main quest and possibly some side quests to do. You pick one of the two explorable areas, and skate around them towards your objective. On the way, you can interact with floating objects to fight random battles, participate in optional skate challenges, or just rack up a huge combo and find some health or mana pickups laying around. Skating is like a simplified, more forgiving Tony Hawk game, but gets pretty hard if you pursue a lot of the optional challenges. Once you arrive at a quest, you’ll get some dialogue options, experience the story, and inevitably be pulled into battle.
The combat rests upon its weakness system: You can guess an enemy’s weakness based on their personality, and if they fall for a taunt, they’ll be debuffed, and take extra damage from attacking skills of that type. All 5 types are the same except for the specific debuff they inflict, and the combat isn’t super deep as a result, but it’s elevated by the storytelling woven through the main story fights. You’ll be given dialogue options that can change the fight’s trajectory, as well as hints as to which types they’re weak to. It’s exciting to balance the mechanical aspects of combat with the ever-changing landscape of the fight, and makes the story battles far more interesting than random encounters.
WATCH THE THIRSTY SUITORS VIDEO REVIEW ABOVE
The combat also features action commands, which boil down to a QTE that reduces the damage you take or increases the damage you inflict. They’re a little repetitive, but they keep the combat from feeling automatic, and work to highlight certain late game moments.
More than anything, Thirsty Suitors leans on its story, and the writing is excellent. The game has a deep grasp of intergenerational trauma, family dynamics, Indian-American culture, and dysfunctional coping mechanisms, and turns these into both the game’s emotional core and expressive fantasy visuals. The animation here is very funny, but also depicts the emotional reality of the situation. Jala parkours all over the place, her dad wobbles onto the table, and her mum stiffly makes passive aggressive comments.
A lot of the game is about Jala atoning for her past, and overcoming the ways she has hurt people to protect herself. Your choices impact her personality in three stats, which influences certain parts of the story as well as her combat stats.
The cooking minigames are made up of slightly more involved quicktime events than the regular actions commands, combined with conversations with your parents and a metre management minigame. Again, it’s nothing too deep, but the story is so good and they’re infrequent enough that it stays fresh.
The game’s art is stylish and coherent, and the music, animation, and effects all support this. There’s plenty to do in Thirsty Suitors, as you can skate as different characters, including a cat and dog, and you can also unlock songs and outfits for Jala. The game took me 9 and a half hours, and I did barely any of the skating challenges, but completed all the side quests and cooking recipes I could find.
This is one of the best stories in a game this year. If you like sharp writing, turn-based combat, a little skating, and don’t mind some quick time events, this is easy to recommend.
Thirsty Suitors is available now on PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox Series S and X, Nintendo Switch, and PC, and is also a part of Game Pass
