Date your weapons! Romance swords, daggers, and polearms to level them up in this “shack-and-slash” dungeon crawling adventure.
Boyfriend Dungeon is a dating simulator & roguelike hybrid Indie game developed and published by Kitfox Games. It was released on August 11, 2021 for Steam, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One; and on Valentine's Day 2023 for PlayStation 5.In Boyfriend Dungeon the main character fights in dungeons across the city of Verona Beach using weapons created from people or other creature that were transformed into weapons. Outside of dungeons the weapons can be turned back into people to date, which can help increase their power and give them new abilities. The dating sequences take place in Visual Novel-like segments.
Your choice of weaponry/romantic partners includes:
- Sunder the Talwar: A charming, rogue-ish club owner.
- Valeria the Dagger: A fiery painter.
- Isaac the Estoc: A dignified elegant financier.
- Sawyer the Glaive: A young student with a love for poetry.
- Pocket the Brass Knuckles: A cat who loves to sunbathe.
- Rowan the Scythe: A mysterious individual with an interest in the dark arts.
- Seven the Lasersaber: A K-Pop idol who loves horror movies.
- Jonah the Axe: A sensitive surfer who struggles to hold down a job.
- Leah the Hammer: A highly competitive champion figure skater.
- Dr Holmes the Whip: A professor at the local university and dungeon boss.
This game provides examples of:
- All Girls Want Bad Boys: If the MC is female and romances Sunder, this trope applies. Sunder is based on the classical bad boy - archetype, being a rebellious party-lover and dancer who might or might not be unfaithful and have a Dark and Troubled Past. It turns out to be a deconstructed example if you make it to the sixth event. Sunder ultimately just isn't ready to be with someone for good, especially someone mortal, and breaks up with the MC.
- Ambiguously Brown:
- Sunder has a darker tan than most of the white characters in-game. Dialogue with Mandy indicates that they met in India, but it's never explicitly stated whether he's from there.
- Valeria is hinted to be latina, with her name and her slightly darker skin-tone.
- Breather Episode: The dating simulation portion of the game plays out as a Visual Novel which serves a nice break to the roguelike gameplay in the dungeons.
- California: The game is explicitly set somewhere in California, seemingly the Pacific Coast. Verona Beach is a fictional town, but might be a Shout-Out to a location of the same name in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (though that Verona Beach is implied to be part of the in-universe counterpart to Los Angeles).
- Character Customization: The player can select the gender of the player character, meaning that they will be a boy looking for a gay partner if they choose a boy or even non-binary.
- Central Theme: Facing your fears and being more open to intimacy. The dungeons you enter spawn monsters based on the player character's greatest insecurities and you can only overcome them with the help of your chosen weapon partner (or partners).
- Disappeared Dad: The MC gets regular texts from their very loving mother, but their father is never mentioned. Can extend to Missing Mom, if you choose to disable mom's texts at the start of the game.
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: The parallels between being a weapon shifter/wielder and LGBTQ+ identities are made even more explicit in the DLC. At one point, Jonah mentions getting in trouble at his job because he transformed in front of a kid who was "weapon curious" to demonstrate how normal and unscary it was, only to have the kid's unsupportive mother complain.
- Equippable Ally: The whole premise of using your allies for their weapon capabilities.
- Everyone Is Bi: None of the love interests seem to really care about your gender. The character customization-screen even states that your gender will not affect your romances. The player character themselves can romance male, female, and non-binary characters and doesn't seem to prefer any option over the other. Same goes for the "dates" your cousin sets you up with including (unfortunately) Eric.
- Jesse himself has an ex-boyfriend named Jonah and a current girlfriend he's recently moved in with. He'll set you up on dates with three guys and one woman before you have a chance to opt out of his matchmaking, suggesting a pretty fluid attitude towards sexual orientation in the universe of the game.
- Olivia is obsessed with Sungwoo, pretty firmly establishing a canonical interest in men, but will agree to be set up on a date with the MC regardless of the gender you're playing as.
- Valeria is one of the few characters who's explicitly multi-sexual rather than player-sexual (though it's only revealed incidentally while she's explaining that she's polyamorous, having recently broken up with Jake and Jessica).
- Failure Is the Only Option: No matter what you do, Sunder will break up with you on the last date and confesses that he's unable to settle down with you and risk an actual intimate relationship. The most the MC can do is completely dissociate from the situation and pretend the break-up never happened. Not that that's really a happier ending...
- Foreshadowing:
- If mom's texts are switched on, she'll send you a message to be careful at the start of the game and mentions that there have been several missing person-cases in Verona Beach. Every weapon you find, except for Isaac who as your mentor is with you from the very beginning and Rowan who you actively have to go looking for, was kidnapped and slightly chipped, then left behind in a dunj.
- Almost all of Sunder's special attacks deal bleed-damage and/or invoke Life Drain after said bleed damage is dealt. This is an early hint about him being a vampire who craves blood for sustenance.
- The Ghost: A few named characters with some significance in lore never make an on-screen appearance. A notable example is Jessica — the third member of Valeria and Jake's artist trio, not to mention Jake's sister and Valeria's ex-girlfriend — is conspicuous in her absence.
- Hipster: Eric, who seems to have a personal vendetta against everything modern.
- Magnetic Hero: The MC has no trouble making the various weapons fall for them. Even Valeria, who is a more guarded and skeptical character immediately remarks that she finds you cute when you find her outside the dungeon. Deconstructed, as said magnetism also gains you the attention of Eric, a full-blown creep who won't take "no" for an answer.
- Mix-and-Match Weapon: Characters can team up during dungeon crawls and when they are transformed into items the powers of those items can be used together.
- Polyamory: It's entirely possible for the MC to date multiple characters at once. Your love interests will be completely okay with it.
- Valeria used to be in a polyamorous relationship with a friend of hers and his sister. It ended badly, though not for the reasons you might think, and she's still pretty obviously okay with the idea of open relationships.
- Seven will explicitly state that he doesn't care whether or not you date other people, though it's less clear if he also has multiple partners or is just comfortable with you doing so.
- The devs have also confirmed that
if they'd had the time and resources, they would have liked to allow you to dual wield in the final dunj, effectively giving you the option to take two characters as end-game dates if you preferred.
- Queer Romance: The game is skewed pretty heavily towards male and non-binary love interests, but all things considered the fact that you have the option to play as any gender and date any gender means that it's actually pretty hard to interpret your character as exclusively heterosexual even if you're playing as a woman (and basically impossible not to read it as a queer romance text — see Everyone Is Bi, above).
- Rescue Romance: If you pursue any of the weapons romantically (aside from Isaac, Rowan, and Jonah), your relationship could be interpreted as this, since you found them knocked out and chipped in a dunj.
- Shout-Out:
- Rowan at one point calls pigeons the most romantic of birds — somewhat surprising considering that their beloved familiar is a raven. Their designer previously worked on Hatoful Boyfriend, a dating sim where you romance pigeons.
- Romeo and Juliet was clearly an inspiration for naming some of the game's locations, such as Verona Mall and Capulet Beach.
- Stalker with a Crush: Eric develops a near obsession with you after your first date and starts to send you texts, spy on you and make advances even when you make it very clear you're not interested.
- Transformation Sequence: Each weapon gets an animated weapon-to-human transformation upon your first meeting with them. With the exception of Isaac, who only transforms back after you exit the tutorial.
- Unseen No More: A couple of lore characters from the base game make on-screen appearances in the Secret Weapons DLC:
- Jesse's fiancée Samantha shows up as the mysterious figure trying to contact you at the start of the new storyline. Turns out they're a grad student of Dr Holmes, the main antagonist of the DLC, and is hoping you'll look into her boss's disappearance after your success tracking down kidnapped weapons in the first two dunjes. She then apologises for not meeting you at the barbecue Jesse invited you to in the base game, explaining that she's very shy, which is also why she chose a weird cloak-and-dagger way of introducing herself instead of just, you know, saying "hi" to her partner's cousin.
- A character called Tank makes a brief cameo as Jonah's surfing buddy. While it's not stated outright, this is meant to be the same Tank who is Pocket's owner and the MC's friendly acquaintance-via-text. Oddly, the game doesn't give you the option to ask Tank about this directly; but witnessing an interaction between Pocket and a wielded Jonah at the cat statue hangout in the mall dunj confirms that the Tank you met is indeed Pocket's owner.
- Weapon-Based Characterization: The Game! Some of the more obvious parallels between personality and weapon form include Rowan the Scythe (a gothic, witchy type in their human form) and Isaac the Estoc (a classy guy with good taste who, incidentally, teaches fencing in his spare time). Some are more subtle: Jonah the Axe bears a design that suggests primary utilities other than combat, suiting his stance as an unintentionally intimidating Badass Pacifist. All the weapon forms have something to say about their untransformed counterpart, though.
- Wedding Bells... for Someone Else: As of the Secret Weapons DLC, the game's final story chapter now ends with the MC attending Jesse and Samantha's wedding, accompanied by the love interest of their choice as their date.
