Gettin’ Smoochy In Athkatla
Once upon a time, we had romances in videogames, and they were dreadful, and we liked them that way. But before we had the first introduction of videogames and romance in the form of Mass Effect 2 there were earlier, stranger, proto-texts, particularly this strange game built around ‘reading’ and ‘dungeons and dragons’ called Baldur’s Gate 2. This game had everything and by that I mean it had an engine that could do a lot of text prompts, and therefore, it wound up featuring almost everything you could imagine a non-typing text parser doing, attempted in its big wonky interface of the infinity engine.
And that included smoochin‘.
But you know what, nobody, nobody on the whole internet ever, has ever written down whether or not these romances were good. What’s more, when I wrote about Baldur’s Gate 2 many moons ago, I mentioned offhandedly some details about the romances but never really touched on what they were like, in the game itself, as game content. That’s a real oversight on my part! When a game like this, a classic has something like that in it, surely it’s prime to look at in Smooch Month. So let’s, shall we?
Content Warning: Sexual assault, abandonment, misogyny.
What? That content warning? Uh, well. Well. I uh.
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