Sucker for Love: Date to Die For - a Review in Three Songs
Tof Eklund, Contributing Editor
Sucker for Love: Date to Die For is, on its surface, a very silly game about getting closer to a flirtatious Elder God by performing eldritch rituals. That silly surface is inherited from the original Sucker for Love game: a short game in DreadXP's Dread X Collection 2 where a typical ecchi dating-sim protagonist (e.g. a scumbag loser) summons Ln'eta, an Elder God who is basically Cthulhu filtered through June Cleaver before being given the full Elvira treatment. Sucker for Love: First Date extended Ln'eta's story and added in Estir (pink-haired anime girl Hastur) and Nyanlathotep (Nyarlathotep as a catgirl full-on furry). These games set the tone: Lovecraftian horror played for laughs and mild titillation.
But below that surface, Sucker for Love: Date to Die For is something more, beyond its predecessors. This game is a queer romance between Stardust, an asexual woman of color, and Rhok'zhan, a deeply traumatized mature woman who just happens to be an uncanny being from outside time and space. The end result is… dare I say it? Post-Lovecraftian.
A jumpscare warning screen that reads, in Japanese and English, “Uh oh! Something scary is about to happen. Continue when ready.)
I hear your questions. "How did this happen? Is it any good? What the actual fuck does “Post-Lovecraftian” mean?" Allow me to explain… in song. I daresay The Police's "Roxanne," Julie Andrews' "The Lonely Goatherd," and Bette Midler's "The Rose" have never shared a mixtape or playlist before, but I think of all three every time I think about Date to Die For. Moreover, like incantations read aloud from a forbidden tome, I must pass them on to you, however unwise that may be.
Some spoilers follow, mostly from very early in the game.
Rhok'zhan / You don't have to put on the red light
An image of Rhok’zan, with dialog reading, “I’ve given it some thought… and while you may be blasphemously abstinent… you’re also the only person in the world that can help me.”
Sting and the Police first performed "Roxanne" in 1977, but it feels as quintessentially '80s as their other big hit "Every Breath You Take" (1983). Both songs are superficially romantic but deeply creepy underneath, their lyrics revealing an obsessive desire to control and monopolize a woman. "Roxanne" is about a john who has fallen in love with a sex worker and decided to monopolise save her. He quickly becomes accusatory "You don't care if it's wrong or if it's right," "told you once I won't tell you again, it's a bad way" and reveals himself "I won't share you with another boy."
Date to Die For has a similar divide between a silly surface layer and depths characterized by an abusive, controlling relationship. Date to Die For opens silly, with the protagonist (Stardust) fleeing a valley girl-turned-cultist through the streets of Sacraman'cho, which is indubitably Sacramento, CA… reinterpreted as small-town Japan. Stardust summons Rhok'zhan out of desperation with a ritual that involved extinguishing magical color-changing candles (that glow red if you re-light them), and Rhok'zan appears, looking like an 80's rock star with big hair, fingerless gloves, a flared fur stole/boa, and oversized jewelry (including mismatched earrings: an inverted cross and a down arrow). Rhok'zhan, it turns out, is pronounced "Roxanne."
Unlike the other two songs on my playlist, I'm almost certain the reference to "Roxanne" (the song) was an intentional rickroll by the game's developer, Akabaka. Intentionally or otherwise, the creepy depths of the Police song are here as well: Rhok'zahn has lost control of her cult, which she both cannot and will not harm, even though they are tormenting her. Stardust compares the cult to a bunch of abusive ex'es, in case the parallel wasn't obvious.
Stardust immediately, impulsively decides to save Rhok'zhan (and hopefully herself) by performing a series of rituals to banish the goddess. But it's not that simple, as Rhok'zhan reveals that our world is her dream. This sets Stardust off on a transformative journey that will see her give up bits of her humanity, starting with the Rotbloom ritual, which connects her to the goddess by planting one of Rhok'zhan's seeds in her chest, a seed that will flower when Stardust dies. This makes Stardust the dictionary definition of a u-haul lesbian.
She yodeled back to the lonely goat-mom
An tome, opened to the pages of “SUMMON FIRSTBORNES” with instructions for a ritual to do so.
"The Lonely Goatherd" is from the classic The Sound of Music (1965), which has its own surface/depth tensions, being a cheerful musical romance about defying and ultimately escaping from Nazis. Andrews' character sings "The Lonely Goatherd" to calm scared children, and they turn it into a deeply disturbing puppet show, like a fever dream fending off a nightmare. Beneath all the yodeling, this is a call-and-response song shared over a very long distance, with the promise of not just love but (biological) family at the end: "soon their duet will become a trio."
Loneliness, distance, faithful response, and family are at the heart (or hearts) of Date to Die For. The characters of Stardust and Rhok'zhan are all about family, with an emphasis on missing family both literally and metaphorically.
Lovecraft wrote very little about "Shub-niggurath, the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!" and that gave Akabaka, Date to Die For's dev, room to envision Rhok'zhan as a thwarted fertility goddess who genuinely loves humankind. Rhok'zhan takes the form of a lavender and purple anthropomorphic goat but she's also the Black Woods, an unearthly forest with three massive hearts at its center. The Black Woods saps the life of all who enter it and drives them mad by amplifying their passions. That's eldritch as hell, but Rhok'zhan is also something completely unknown in Lovecraft's original stories: a nuanced and believable woman.
If Rhok'zhan is the Elder Goddess that Lovecraft could never have imagined, Stardust is a direct repudiation of Lovecraft. Not only is fear never her strongest emotion, she faces fear of the unknown, and even fear of becoming something unknown, with curiosity and hope. Possibly more important than any of that, Stardust is Black. Akabaka has said that Stardust's experience with the Thousand was inspired in part by "Greenroom," a Lovecraft Country episode where the danger Black Americans faced in white "sundown" towns was given an occult dimension. Just in case you didn't know, H.P. Lovecraft was hella racist. I've started thinking of "Lovecraftian" stories that reject racism and question whether we should fear the unknown as "post-Lovecraftian." Stardust is the quintessential post-Lovecraftian protagonist.
Stardust hears and responds to Rhok'zhan's subliminal call (silent yodel?) because she's drawn to the unknown: initially the mystery of what happened to her family. Stardust resists the influence of the Black Woods because her strongest passion is to find family: she's not overcome with lust because she's asexual, and she doesn't succumb to rage because while she is capable of violence, she doesn't want to hurt anyone.
It's problematic to make someone else's identity into a plot device. In Date to Die For this risks flattening all the diversity of ace and a-grey experience into the superpower "immune to lust." If you're looking for queer community representations of asexuality, I recommend Ace in Space and robo-tea:1cup!. That said, Date to Die For was read for sensitivity and (speaking as an ally to the ace community) I thought it was handled well.
Stardust is motivated by a desire for connection and family: romantically, with Rhok'zhan, but also empathetically with the very cultists trying to kill her, and always, however much in the background, to her missing parents and siblings. Stardust's boundless tenacity in pursuing (re-)connection and family is the only genuinely terrifying thing in this game. Stardust always answers Rhok'zhan's call, no matter the distance, no matter what's in the way, no matter how many times it's been. It seems Stardust wasn't immune to Rhok'zhan's aura after all: instead, she takes being driven "mad" with passion and therein finds apotheosis. Step aside, "Tekeli-li!" the new cry of unearthly passion is "Ode lay-ee-ee!"
It's the dream, afraid of waking, that never takes the chance
Stardust, looking in the mirror, sees herself transformed with a pair of goat horns.
My family listened to a lot of Country music while I was growing up, so it was initially the 1983 Conway Twitty cover of "The Rose" that played in my head. But Bette Midler's original 1979 performance in the musical of the same title is hands-down the best. Midler opens this live performance of "The Rose" with a version of "the stars were right," and then it gets weird.
The Rotbloom ritual permanently changed Stardust not just in one timeline, but cosmically. Every time Stardust is incarnated in one of Rhok'zhan's dreams, she bears the seed of that early act of devotion. The Rotbloom flower is likewise persistent. By the second half of the game, Stardust's ancestral home is full of eldritch Rotblooms, each one a marker of a time she failed and died.
“The Rose" is a song about learning to love again after pain and loss. After comparing love to a drowning river, a slicing razor, and insatiable hunger, Midler sings "I say love, it is a flower, and you, the only seed." Just as Rhok'zhan's seed is planted in Stardust's heart, Stardust is the seed planted in Rhok'zhan's broken hearts.
The field of death-commemorations in her house doesn't even phase Stardust. If anything, the field of Rotblooms is the uncanny bouquet she lays at Rhok'zhan's feet. By this point, Stardust is no longer entirely human. The Rotbloom ritual is the least of it - but she hasn't lost any of her humanity in the process. The most powerfully post-Lovecraftian thing about this game is that Stardust becomes other without ever becoming less.
Rhok'zhan has been deeply traumatized, and Date to Die For gives her the time it takes to rebuild a sense of self and the ability to trust someone else. When we first meet Rhok'zhan, she vacillates between over-the-top flirtation and curling up nearly into fetal position: between trying to establish a shallow relationship based on desirability and withdrawing entirely. The way that develops into a calm confidence in Stardust is a remarkably sensitive representation of recovery after abuse, especially for a game that takes a literal horny goat of an Elder God and puts her in a t-shirt with the slogan "Aways in the moooooo-d."
"The Rose" concludes "Just remember in the winter / Underneath the bitter snow / Lies the seed that with the sun's love / In the spring, becomes the rose." It's schmaltzy and sentimental and deeply memorable. It's like Date to Die For, which is silly and perhaps a bit camp but also a believably happy queer story that steals Lovecraft's clothes and wears them to Pride.
Outro/Beyond
Rhok'zhan, pictured in a t-shirt with the image of a cow and. text that reads “Always in the Moooood.” Dialog reads, “Die, let die, or kill. I know. these are impossible choices for you especially, but. whatever choice you make, I’m behind you 100%, my starlight.”
In trying to balance silliness with a credible representation of abuse, and to balance that theme with a sappily wholesome romance, Date to Die For inevitably stumbles. Parts of the story that work as a fantasy about "seeing the good in everyone" don't work well as part of a story about recovery from partner abuse and domestic violence, even if the victim is eternal and divine. I won't poke further at that, but I will take back what I said about Stardust being the only terrifying thing in Date to Die For. The things some men do to their gods, to "their" women, to the things they claim to worship, are really fucking scary.
There's something else late in Date to Die For that I don't really want to touch, not yet, not in this review. It's a door I really don't want to open, but I'm glad is there. It gives meaning to everything else.
A practical endnote: one of Date to Die For's accessibility options is adding cutesy notifications before jumpscares, for players who don't want to be surprised. I'm no fan of jumpscares, so I decided to play with it on, and it mostly worked fine… and that's a problem. Sometimes (mostly in Episode 2) the jumpscare notification didn't trigger, so I got jumpscared when I thought that "couldn't" happen. That didn't ruin the game for me, but it could be a complete dealbreaker for some players. An option like that really has to work 100% of the time or it risks being worse than nothing.
Dread XP. provided a code for this game. As usual for GwG, PR played no part in the resulting writing or publication of this review.
