‘Demon House of Dates’ mobile game is Tinder from hell

Online dating is hell, but the new webcomic-inspired mobile game Demon House of Dates makes this sentiment literal. And actually, it’s a better time than most of your nightmare Tinder hookups.

Released Thursday, the visual novel dating sim is a demonic Tinder experience (but, like, in the cute way instead of the #TooReal way). Created in collaboration with Tapas Media and Palmstorm, it brings artist Joanne Kwan’s popular Demon House webcomic to life. And Mashable got exclusive early access to play around with the demo that’s steamy in that deathless prince of darkness kind of way.  

On Sinder (get it?) you, a mere mortal looking for love in the legitimate worst place, can choose between several different demons whose profiles vary from the fun and flirty one-night stand to the long-walks-on-the-beach type.

As someone who in real life was given the moniker of “Satan’s girlfriend” by a college professor, I felt particularly suited for this Luciferian spin on dating apps. I’m pretty convinced I’d have a much easier time with online dating if my location radius could include the fiery abyss below rather than just the aboveground cesspool of Los Angeles my Tinder is currently limited to.

Image: TAPAS MEDIA / PALMSTORM

LA can keep its alleged angels (AKA aspiring actor/model/director/models, 22-year-old “entrepreneurs,” and the dreaded social media influencer). I’m way more at home in a city of bangable Beelzebubs. 

Swiping through pics of beautifully rendered sexy Satan spawns, it’s striking what a splash of the devil can do to your eye-rollingly standard online dating profile.  One very #LiveLoveLaugh demon named Velgranok finished his bio by saying he was, “happy to come indoors and sit in a nice fire.”

You’ve got seven days to seal the deal with your soul-eating mate

Hot. Same.

After swiping right on the lovely demon of your dreams, you have a brief convo over the “mad chatter” app. It’s another one of those achingly familiar and mundane exchanges too, where you both pretend to be too cool for online dating. 

When you meet up, you can choose whether the IRL spawn of Satan lives up to his/her/their online persona or not. Each demon I matched with proved to not only be devilishly good looking, but also intriguingly gender fluid. From what I could tell, the dialogue makes no assumption about your gender or your magical bae’s, either. Hell yeah.

Then you’ve got seven days to seal the deal with your soul-eating mate. You interact by choosing from a few dozen situations, represented as emoji that range from the universally understood eggplant to that deranged drunk face no one knows what to do with. 

Image: TAPAS MEDIA / PALMSTORM

Your location (for now only cafe, university, beach, and home are available — but a promised update will add a club, cinema, and park), initiates a variety of different situations that end by either filling more of your romance meter or sending it down to the fiery depths from whence it came.

And it turns out that the true horror of dating a demon is that it’s usually just as banal as your typical, garden-variety subpar online date.

The true horror of dating a demon is that it’s usually just as banal as your typical, garden-variety subpar online date.

In its current form, Demon House of Dates has far too little dialogue options, choices, and branching paths, often repeating exchanges and not doing much to tailor dates to your preferred demon bae’s personality. Once you’ve gone through even just two beaus, it feels like you’ve seen most of the potential interactions apart from a few hidden ones. Representing activities through emoji is clever, but often fails to communicate to the player what they’ve actually signed up for. 

If we’re being generous, you can see this as some clever meta commentary on the monotony of online dating, which tends to feel like you’re caught in a loop of the same bad date with a few superficial differences. And the unintended outcomes of choosing the wrong emoji — well, isn’t that a perfect metaphor for the failures of digital communication?

If we’re being real, though, it’s more likely that these are design flaws rather than intentional social commentary. 

The somewhat shoddy and incomplete design is not helped by the fact that annoying ads pop up frequently. You not only have to sit through 30-second commercials, but also navigate the typical manipulative Free-to-Play ad tactics, like making the “x” to close out hard to see. 

Image: TAPAS MEDIA / PALMSTORM

To be fair, it’s a free game, and you’ve got to pay for the labor that went into making it somehow. But the $2.99 ad-free price point doesn’t seem to be wholly justified by the amount of content and playtime currently offered. Mashable was told that one other location would be made available about a week after launch, with a variety of other locations coming after that.

That’s not to say Demon House of Dates isn’t a great concept with lots of worthwhile funny moments. But after enjoying your first playthrough, you might prefer waiting for the updates. Though it’s also possible that fans of the webcomics will be more than satisfied with just getting an interactive version of the truly rad and wild world Kwan has created.

My love life simply felt cursed.

However the biggest irony of Demon House of Dates is that, to my knowledge, you can’t really win. Or tellingly, maybe I just personally had zero ability to figure out how to play the game in a way that ended successfully with my demonic dates.

I tried every combination of emoji and locations, desperate to play my cards right to bang my significant other (or perhaps in this case, SO should stand for “Satanic offspring”). But even clicking on the heart emoji often resulted in a negative outcome. Eggplant didn’t even get me any peach emoji!

My love life simply felt cursed. And that’s when shit started feeling way too real. 

Because listen, I’m actually totes chill with a date on the beach ending with my demonic lover extracting milk from a mermaid’s teat for me to drink. But hell hath no wrath like an online date scorned.

Image: TAPAS MEDIA / PALMSTORM

And lemme tell you, getting broken up with by multiple spawns of legit hell is humbling. I always liked the bad boys, but if you play with fire I guess you’re bound to get burned. Like, third degree from an eternal flame of darkness that sets your soul ablaze kind of burn. 

You thought ghosting was bad? Try having your date despise you so much that they disappear in a cloud of sulfuric black smoke, preferring to be caught dead in an inferno of unending nightmares rather than hang out with you for even one more day. 

It just stings, you know? And not in the sexy demon horn kinda way. 

You can download Joanne Kwan’s Demon House of Dates for free in the App Store or Google Play.