Work Text:
POLYANTHEON will eat your soul.
This is not an exaggeration. I have friends— gasp , shock, whatever—that I ping every 12 hours or so to make sure they’re still alive. POLYANTHEON is here, it’s queer, and it’s taking no fucking prisoners. Every inch of this game is designed to drag you kicking and screaming into a world beyond basic imagination, or even the imagination you’d need to be a dedicated and beloved fantasy author with a massive universe and more than fifty books to your name.
Anyway.
Our editor will murder me if I skip the technical portion. POLYANTHEON is generally labelled a dating sim, which is probably the reason they put me on this review. This is a true statement that somehow completely fails to capture what we’re working with here. In addition to your usual suite of “toss something extra in to make the dating sim more entertaining”, AKA fighting game (check), crafting (check), and puzzles (check), there’s also a rhythm game portion (dance based) and a different rhythm game portion (drumkit/guitar/musical instrument etc. based). The built in card game is hideously, delightfully, inscrutably intricate. I literally spent twelve hours— not in game—on it when this first came out. Still not the most playtime in one sitting that I personally have heard of, but it’s a pyrrhic victory.
When you start the game, you pick a character in the same sense that you pick a nickname—you absolutely fucking don’t, you go through character creation by filling out Q+As and prompts, and one of the six characters is assigned to you purely based on vibes . You do not find out what you look like until you fully complete the game. Your last scene—and this isn’t a spoiler, the game devs are posting and reposting memes about this literally all the time, the last count was that they’d hit about 238 [EDITOR’S NOTE: At time of publishing, the count had hit 413]—involves you seeing your reflection in a mirror, or a your favourite rippling pond that’s suddenly calmed, or the metal of your sword suddenly shining bright,or some other insane and unexpected reflective surface.
[ID: Meme posted to the main POLYANTHEON Tumblr account:
BROKE: The character is the character, no changes allowed
WOKE: Character selection is accessible and fat friendly, has a variety of skin tones and hairstyles that accurately reflect human diversity
BESPOKE: Character selector was built with inputs from various groups with a focus on diversity, inclusion, and making all feel seen, heard, and welcomed
SOME WORSE FOURTH THING: Vibes based character assignment where you don’t know what the fuck you look like]
[ID: Meme posted to the main POLYANTHEON Tumblr account:
TFW you see your character’s face in the reflected glow of your somehow silver-coloured magic for the first time ever…]
If you can figure out a way to play it through as more than one character, I salute you. This game seems designed to figure you out more than you can figure it out.
Fuck, I haven’t even gotten to talking about the dating portion.
You start out in seeming contention and camaraderie with your fellow gods, like all the mythos and lore you can imagine but on steroids of a sort. Everyone is beautiful and everyone loves and hates and fucks in equal measure, but then you slowly start…shifting the boundaries of what your relationships are, what they can be. The entire point and purpose of the game’s dating portion (or maybe the game itself) is geared towards challenging the traditional hierarchy of relationships, the reductive stereotypes that build up around what we humans perceive as the norm with regards to love and loving and romance—platonic and romantic loves alike.
Polyamory is putting it lightly with this game.
If you’ve ever wanted to take a deep and introspective look at how you feel about the people you love in your life, about the way you show affection, about how it might feel to live inside or under or as an attraction model you did not yet know? You should play this game.
I honestly think that everyone should play this game. I think we should all let ourselves learn the lessons that Davraethiel needs to face, give ourselves the grace that Johratheon found, find the heart-homes that Jaddenim did, uncover the mysteries that Rosaeldri sought—we should learn to be a little more like the fraternally present Prince Elector and the matronly obscure Lady Regent. So rarely do we let ourselves challenge our own preconceived notions of what love looks like.
It’s hard to find the words to say what this game means to me, to explain what exactly about it makes me come back, time and time again. I could talk about the story for days, the lore for months, and the deeper societal implications of this game’s existence for years . I won’t—I don’t want to spoil the experience you’re about to face for you—but I could .
Anyway, I main Davraethiel. Go off I guess.