From left to right: Shoji, Hendrik, Deandre, Kyler and Melissa.
C14 Dating is a Dating Sim by Winter Wolves.
Melissa Flores is traveling away from her home state of California to spend eight weeks in a summer class taking place in an archeological dig site in Belgium, with very little French under her belt. As the nearby Liège university requires its students to spend a few weeks assisting at a dig site regardless of major, there are plenty of local students there, as well. Among them, she becomes acquainted with the aloof Kyler who is given the square next to hers, friendly rugby player Deandre and shy fellow gamer Shoji. She also bonds with Hendrik, the permanent excavation team's young geologist. She and one of those young men might just end up becoming something else than friends by the time the class ends.
For each of the eight weeks, the player needs to choose if Melissa will dig in the cave or clean the findings in the lab on a given day and how she will fill her free time. There are some days on which the workplace chosen dictates with whom Melissa has a meaningful interaction. The closest thing the romantic routes have to a bad ending is Melissa and the potential love interest parting as extremely good friends instead.
The following tropes might be unearthed:
- Alcohol-Induced Idiocy: Accepting Deandre's invitation to the party on the first week, but not avoiding alcohol, can result in Melissa returning to Shoji's tent instead of her own. It can be extended to getting angry at Shoji for waking her up when he returns.
- Ambiguously Bi: Deandre and Kyler, towards each other. Despite starting on the wrong foot, Kyler's tendency to stick to his first impression of people and various incidents that have every reason to sour the mood between them even more, they seem to be spending a lot of time together off-screen. The latter is to the point that when Shoji gets the news that his mother is in the hospital on Week 7, the two of them show up at the same time for no apparent reason. They are also seen deciding to exchange phone numbers at the last minute in Kyler's routes. On the individual level:
- Kyler's attitude towards Deandre's friendly interactions with Melissa sometimes comes across as jealousy. In Deandre's friendship ending, Deandre mentions that Kyler came to watch one of his rugby games (something that doesn't come up in Deandre's romance ending) and claimed to happen to be in the area, yet Deandre knew Kyler was working in Germany at the time the game took place.
- When the grades get posted, Deandre's phone can't connect to the website and the first person he asks to check his grade for him is Kyler. During that same event, he tricks Kyler into telling him to not "mate" him. A following event includes Deandre calling Kyler "cute if you squint".
- Artificial Limbs: Hendrik lost a hand in a car accident and has a fairly mundane replacement. The hand part of his forearm-covering prothestic seems to be mostly cosmetic and he sometimes needs to detach it to use the Hook Hand he has underneath. His route includes an event in which he asks Melissa to hold his hand while she is assisting him with a task and quickly turns out to mean the removable one.
- Asian and Nerdy: Downplayed in that Shoji, the geekiest option, is half-Japanese.
- Bilingual Bonus: The game is set in the French-speaking part of Belgium and English tends to be used by others strictly for Melissa, Sherri or Rosemarie's benefit, so French dialog pops up each time French speakers are seen talking with each other or non-anglophone background characters. Things that can be enjoyed by understanding French include Deandre telling a bunch of schoolchildren who are visiting the cave that he's digging for gold.
- Brick Joke: One scene has Melissa mention that her father is disappointed that she hasn't unearthed a dinosaur yet. In the solo ending, which is the result of properly focusing on raising stats, Melissa's father's words of encouragement for her presentation involves telling her to show off the dinosaurs. For the record, the dig site is from a time at which dinosaurs were already extinct.
- But for Me, It Was Tuesday: This is the main reason Hendrik couldn't explain the incident that got him on Kyler's bad side to the third party involved after the circumstances that made it risky to do so during the incident itself went away. Augustin gives students who make mistakes angry lectures in public so routinely that Hendrik is quite sure he had forgotten giving Kyler a lecture at all by the time it was safe to talk about it.
- Chekhov's Gunman: In most routes, Paige, the other student from Melissa's university who was prevented from coming to the class by a last-minute family emergency, is forgotten after getting mentioned early in the game. In the proper solo ending, she's seen talking to Melissa right before her presentation about the class.
- Comically Missing the Point: The extent to which it's done on purpose is ambiguous, but Deandre at some point quips about Kyler having a stalactite up his ass. When asked to watch his language, he corrects his statement so it mentions a stalagmite, the latter being the version of the formation that emerges from the ground and hence the one that would be the most likely to enter the orifice involved in his quip.
- The Computer Is a Lying Bastard: From the second week onwards, the week planner indicates where each male love interest is working on a given day, implying that this is the place Melissa needs to be to have the best chance at triggering one of their events. Typically, two will be marked as being in the cave and two will be marked as being in the lab. On the good side on the trope, there are days on which Melissa will have a chance to raise affection with everyone, or at least the same subset of people, regardless of the option picked; this includes Joan, whose semi-Secret Character status results in her schedule not being shown. On the bad side of this trope, there are some love interests with whom a scene will be missed if the player relies entirely on the week planner:
- If Melissa has an online chat with Shoji during the second weekend and makes the choices that result in her finding out Shoji knows his way around older technology, extra affection can be gained with Shoji by calling upon him to look into a reluctant piece of slightly dated machinery on the following Wednesday. The reluctant piece of technology is in the lab, but Shoji needs to be grabbed from the cave. Because of this, the day planner makes it look like that the best bet in getting a scene with Shoji that day is going to the cave.
- One of Hendrik's events is triggered via discovering the atlatl training grounds while walking to the cave with Deandre and asking Hendrik about them. The week planner almost always marks Hendrik as being in the lab, including on that day.
- Contrived Coincidence: Hendrik and Rosemarie's first meeting. After a fight with her girlfriend with whom she also lived, Rosemarie decided to stay at a friend's place and have good cry there. She showed up in front of the right appartment door, but on the wrong floor and noticed her mistake only when Hendrik opened his door. Since Rosemarie had already gotten the crying part of her plan started, she already had a bad case of Your Makeup Is Running and Hendrik offered her to use his sink to fix it before going to her friend's. Hendrik had brought work home, Rosemarie noticed on the way to the sink and an unexpected networking opportunity was born.
- Cuteness Proximity: If Melissa chooses to watch a bunny video on a computer borrowed from Hendrik instead of letting him back on it once she's done with her e-mail, Hendrik notices and chases her away thanks to being in a worse mood than usual. He very briefly gets distracted by the bunny's cuteness in the middle of displacing Melissa.
- Death as Comedy: The presence of some ancient human remains in the dig site, how angry Augustin can get when students make mistakes and the sometimes morbid sense of humor shared by several characters (including Augustin himself) result in a few jokes about people getting murdred.
- Defrosting Ice Queen: Kyler is the potential love interest that comes off as the most asocial in the beginning, but becomes more approachable as the game progresses. While some of it happens no matter what, his more likable sides are best seen if his route, in which he notices he has been speaking with more people recently, is followed.
- Don't Be Ridiculous: It's possible to have Augustin crack a joke about Sherri's speciality in forensics by claiming that some of the literal skeletons in Sherri's closet are her former lovers. Sherri chides him for making the joke, then whispers the words "just my first husband".
- Drives Like Crazy: If she gets driven to the airport by Deandre, Melissa will come out of the car feeling like she's just been on a roller coaster and one those towers that drop seats at high speed.
- Fictional Counterpart: The video games discussed with Shoji:
- Chronicles of Celida is clearly meant to be The Legend of Zelda. The specific installment that Shoji's hoodie is based on, Twenty Masks, can easily be narrowed down to being Majora's Mask by someone who played it: the installment is remembered for needing to collect many masks, a quest involving lovers and the inhabitants of the main town having their own schedules. A comment made about the "Lovers' Quest" hints at the game's "Groundhog Day" Loop.
- Mockets, a Long Runner Role-Playing Game with many Mons, with a subset of the latter referred to as "first generation", to Pokémon.
- If Melissa chooses the cave on the day she uses the shortcut to make up for getting lost while jogging, Shoji will see her arriving and ask what happened, prompting Melissa to make a joke about having failed a Weight and Switch. Shoji jokingly calls her by the name of fictional character whose first name is Laura in response, which implies the existence of a counterpart to Tomb Raider.
- If Shoji is befriended, he will lend Melissa a copy of Motel Dawn 2, a game notorious for having made it to Europe, but not the Americas. Such a thing is known to have happened with the sequel to Hotel Dusk: Room 215.
- Forced Out of the Closet: An accidental case that ranges from consequence-free to an outright positive outcome. If Melissa makes the right choices during the festival, she will enter the museum while a visitor is flirting with Hendrik. Rosemarie, who is watching the conversation from a distance, makes a few comments about Hendrik being oblivious to the flirting and lets the word "ace" slip before suddenly acting like she said something she shouldn't have. When Melissa asks if she was about to say "ace geologist", Rosemarie claims it was indeed the case. After Rosemarie ends their conversation, Melissa turns out to have actually perfectly understood the piece of information Rosemarie let slip. If the player gets to the point where the character comes out to Melissa himself, he finds out that she already knows because of the event above. He also realizes that Melissa had that knowledge on hand when she accepted to go on a date with him and said knowledge is not keeping her from having enough romantic interest in him to give a Long-Distance Relationship a shot. For that reason, he decides to forgive the person who let the information slip.
- Foreshadowing:
- Upon their respective first encounters, Kyler mentions that it's his fourth year working at Calen cave, while Hendrik mentions that it's his fourth year helping out with the summer class. Deandre also pins Kyler as the sort of person who sticks to his first impressions of people. Being curious about the reason Kyler and Hendrik don't get along will reveal that the latter was, in practice, having his trial period during Kyler's first time excavating as a student. He showed Kyler a special feature of his square, which Kyler later showed Augustin when the latter checked on him and Augustin got extremely angry at Kyler for apparently making an assumption as someone with no archeology expertise. As Augustin hates being told he's wrong while he's giving a lecture, Hendrik didn't step in to tell Augustin had been the one to tell Kyler out of fear of not keeping his job, all while still being within Kyler's visual field.
- On the first day, Melissa hears a familiar video game tune, which prompts her to check that it's not coming from her own handheld console. The fact that it turns out to not be the case indicates that there is another person who both brought a handheld console and plays the same game. Melissa only properly meets Shoji the day after the incident.
- The game is littered with hints of Hendrik's asexuality, including a claim on Augustin's part that he lacks interest in both formerly alive things and currently alive things, Rosemarie's "ace geologist" nickname for him and the fact that he's completely oblivious to the fact that some geology terms can have a That Came Out Wrong problem. The very first conversation with him also gets cake involved quite quickly.
- Choosing a set of options can result in Hendrik being described as looking at Melissa as if she has found flint in her wet screen. Rosemarie makes a joke about the research building being haunted by the ghosts of students who found stone tools in their wet screen not that long after the event that reminds Melissa of both the importance of context and how furious Augustin can get towards mistakes. Some time later, if she chooses the cave on the sixth week's Wednesday, Melissa finds something of similar importance in her own wet screen.
- Kyler's hoodie (which has a constellation decoration) and his answer to what the first Neanderthals to enter a cave would have seen it as (a starless night) hint at his other hobby, which is discovered quite late into his romantic route: astronomy.
- Fun with Homophones: If Melissa chooses to protect Joan while gathering vines for the festival, which is the option that will lock the player in Joan's romantic route, Rosemarie and Chantal will suspect something happened while Melissa and Joan were alone. Since Melissa is embarrassed to have protected Joan from a threat that turned out to be a bear-shaped cutout being moved by Augustin, Joan only goes as far as mentioning the word "bear" with little context. Rosemarie and Chantal understand the word "bare", which just makes Rosemarie ask what, exactly was bared.
- Gay Option: Joan, one of the female friends Melissa makes. She's a Secret Character to an extent, as her route consists entirely of detours from the routes of the male love interests.
- Geeky Analogy: If Shoji ends up being the one to check on Melissa when she gets the idea that she has wasted her time on the class, his advice to her includes a few video game analogies. It happens both because he knows she will understand and because this is the best way he's able to convey it on the spot.
- Got Me Doing It: When Hendrik's Relationship Values get high enough, his entry changes to Melissa claiming that she has started making rock-based puns and blames him for it.
- Gratuitous German: A tendency to use random German words is all Hendrik and Rosemarie have to show for having worked in a corner of Germany in which they could get by on English alone.
- Group Picture Ending: If Melissa becomes good enough friends with all five love interests, the class will end with her getting a photo consisting of herself, Deandre, Kyler, Hendrik, Shoji, Joan, Chantal and Rosemarie.
- Guide Dang It!:
- One thing that is a little hard to notice or consider to be a possibility without the online guide provided by the creators is that all five of the love interests will gain extra affection points via doing specific activities rather than raising specific stats. Meanwhile, stats only matter over activities if the player is going for the solo ending, which is a secret in itself. This means that in addition to getting as many events as possible with the coveted love interest, Melissa must study a lot to raise affection with Kyler, inquire a lot for Hendrik, game a lot for Shoji, play rugby a lot for Deandre and socialize a lot for Joan. In the game itself, Kyler, Shoji and Hendrik are hinted at via their respective activity having another animation in which they are present that starts being used when Melissa gets sufficiently close to them, while Deandre and Joan are in their respective activity's animation from the very beginning. The activity symbols shown alongside the male love interests in the trailer aren't much help either: those for Deandre and Shoji are correct, but the one associated with Kyler is for working in the cave, while the one associated with Hendrik went on to become the weekend-only activity raising the same stat to the one that needs to be done on weekdays to get his affection.
- The best possible answer to one of Deandre's events is to share with him a soil consistency test taught by Kyler. Both learning how to do the test from Kyler and sharing it with Deandre requires going to the cave on two different days of the second week. Getting both scenes while arranging to always be where Kyler is working is fairly easy, but following Deandre to wherever he's working will result in Melissa not being taught the soil test.
- Hands-On Approach:
- If Melissa finds out about the atlatl training grounds early and joins the impromptu practice session offered by Hendrik, Chantal, who has called Hendrik "beau" (good-looking) in a previous scene, also joins. She gets quite deliberate about making mistakes after Hendrik demonstrates, making Melissa realize that Chantal is hoping for a physical correction of her posture. As Hendrik sticks to trying to correct her with verbal instructions, Deandre ends up being the one who physically corrects her posture.
- For the festival, Hendrik is in charge of setting up an atlatl practice space and Melissa can choose to help him with it. Hendrik's demonstration of how to properly hold the atlatl during that event does get tactile. Helping with a love interest's festival preparations unlocks an image and Hendrik's is focused on the moment he shows Melissa how to hold the atlatl properly.
- Hypocrite:
- Upon her introduction, Rosemarie tells Hendrik to not pun around her, all while calling him something that turns out to be a pun if Hendrik's route is pursued. The "ace" in "ace geologist" has two possible meanings and Hendrik qualifies for both.
- One of the options for greeting Shoji upon finding him online late at night on the second week-end is to chide him for being up late.
- Imagined Innuendo: Deandre is prone to picking up sexual meanings where none are intended, between his dirty mind, the Separated by a Common Language aspects of his New Zealand English compared to everyone else's and the homonyms of some geology terms. The scene in which Melissa walks into a room while Hendrik (a Pungeon Master who is also the "oblivious to innuendos" type of asexual) is on the tail end of giving Deandre a long geology talk is a sight to behold.
- I Need to Go Iron My Dog: In the bonus scene for his romance route, Kyler will claim to have hypoxia as an excuse to leave when Sherri comes to their square to talk with Melissa.
- I Resemble That Remark!: Melissa reacts to Deandre saying that she's pushy by shoving Deandre while claiming that she's not pushy. As Deandre himself points out, it only serves to make his case to the third person to whom he's talking.
- Irony: One of the scenes with Kyler has him reveal that he's wary of Melissa flirting with Deandre in part because one of Sherri's (Melissa's professor) previous students started a romance during the class, then dropped it without warning to travel to another country with her new boyfriend. It's entirely possible for Kyler to become the next person to romance one of Sherri's students.
- In-Series Nickname: Augustin is shown nicknaming Melissa both "Petite Fleur" and "Little Flower", both being allusions to her "Flores" surname in French and English respectively. Deandre and some other characters take to calling Melissa "Mel". Hendrik and Rosemarie's Like Brother and Sister closeness is shown partly via them addressing each other as "Hen" and "Rose".
- Interface Spoiler: Joan is supposed to be a Secret Character, but exploring the gallery of unlockable images before even starting to play shows that one of the pages is dedicated to her.
- The Internet Is for Cats: E-mails aside, the only thing Melissa seems to be going online for is watching cute bunny videos.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall:
- One of the things mentioned about the Fictional Counterpart to The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask that both Melissa and Shoji have played is the fact that the player's actions can impact the fate of its characters. This element is also present to the game itself to an extent and some of Shoji's own events have options that only show up if specific choices were made during a previous event.
- Some of the epilogues mention Shoji's side job working on a romance game for an indie company.
- In the last-week scene that can be viewed after winning over Kyler romantically, Sherri visits Melissa while she and Kyler are having a conversation. After Kyler finds an excuse to leave and it's made clear Sherri knows what's going on between them, Melissa jokingly asks Sherri is she gets extra points for having managed to romance someone during the summer class. In a game belonging to a genre in which romancing a Non-Player Character is the main objective.
- Like Brother and Sister: Upon Rosemarie's introduction, she and Hendrik are shown to know each other extremely well and their banter makes in clear that Rosemarie will be staying at Hendrik's place while she's in the area. When Melissa asks, Rosemarie confirms that they are not a couple and mentions that she's not even attracted to men. She remains the person Hendrik is the most likely to be found hanging out with and Hendrik's romantic route has him mention Rosemarie figured he had romantic feelings for Melissa before he did.
- Long-Distance Relationship:
- Any relationship Melissa starts during the game becomes one upon its ending by design, as she returns to California.
- Shoji's parents were in one for some time, before the Internet era. This is a factor in him trusting that he and Melissa can make their relationship work in his romantic route.
- This is what kept Melissa's relationship with her high school boyfriend from lasting longer than it did. In the romantic route in which this comes up, she hopes that she will manage the budding relationship better.
- Lost Food Grievance: A justified case, as it happens when Melissa is hoping to improve an already sour mood by having her trademark soup with added cheese, so her mood worsens when she notices that she has been dropping her cheese next to her bowl instead of inside it.
- Married to the Job: Many have described Hendrik as married to his job, according to Hendrik himself. This is zig-zagged in practice. One one hand, he's passionate about his job, he needs to put a lot of work to make up for the excavation site being open only eight weeks a year and his uncle thinks he could use socializing more. On the other hand, he's able to maintain a Like Brother and Sister friendship with Rosemarie and whichever type of relationship Melissa chooses to have with him.
- Not What It Looks Like: If making the replacement Neanderthal cutout ends up involving Deandre drawing the outline around Melissa, he'll notice she's ticklish and start tickling her while she's lying on the ground, resulting in a double dose:
- Kyler walks into the room, they realize their activity could easily be mistaken for something much more intimate and Deandre tells Kyler it's not what it looks like. In Deandre's romance route, the bonus scene consists of Deandre getting noticed by Kyler while he's hugging Melissa from behind, Kyler assuming it's "not what it looks like" once again and Deandre telling him it actually is what it looks like.
- When Shoji returns to finish the cutout after taking a long time with his call, he turns to have returned earlier, but gotten the impression that Melissa and Deandre were in the middle of something, causing him to promptly leave again.
- Performance Anxiety: Joan is a good flute player, but gets nervous in front of an audience. It's to the point that she's considering making a living via teaching others rather than joining the entertainment industry.
- Point of No Return: On the sixth week's Wednesday, Melissa will realize she made a major mistake, have a huge moment of self-doubt about her chances in passing the class and retreat to her tent. The love interest who comes to check on her when it happens is the only person with whom a best friend or romance ending will be possible for the rest of the playthrough, no matter who the player was aiming for. Sherri shows up instead if the game doesn't consider Melissa sufficiently good friends with any of the love interests.
- The Prankster: Rosemarie at the very least has a streak of it. The following are all things Melissa can potentially hear about within six weeks of meeting her for the first time:
- In Hendrik's romantic route, Rosemarie compares the face he made when she first suggested he could be in love with Melissa to the one he made when she glued googly eyes on his (huge) rock collection.
- She got on Kyler's bad side by planting knapped flint in his wet screen. Twice.
- If Melissa watches Rosemarie knap flint during the festival, she gets a piece as a souvenir and Rosemarie tells Melissa to not plant it in her digging square or someone else's.
- Pun-Based Title: C14 dating is a method used to determine the age of an archeological find, but the presence of the word "dating" is quite convenient when one is looking for a title for a Dating Sim.
- Pungeon Master: Hendrik is a treasure trove of geology puns.
- Having Melissa make a pun of her own when given the opportunity is a good way to get a head start in Hendrik's Relationship Values upon first meeting him.
- When Deandre acts like a Neanderthal stereotype to amuse a group of schoolchildren and Kyler makes the obvious pun (Deandertal), Hendrik's immediate reaction is to laugh alongside the children and doing it so hard his stomach hurts. When it comes up in a later conversation, he wishes he had thought of it.
- Reunion Vow: In Shoji's romantic route, he and Melissa exchange their copies of the Mockets game before parting, making it necessary for them to meet again to get them back.
- Shipper on Deck:
- Rosemarie plays that role both in Hendrik's route as his Like Brother and Sister and in Joan's as a fellow lesbian.
- In Shoji's route, his mother explicitly knows of Melissa's existence and encourages him to spend more time with her.
- Sherri approves of Melissa's "networking" with Kyler in the bonus scene in the latter's romantic route.
- Shrinking Violet: Shoji's default setting outside of his Situational Sociability is to rarely be the one initiating conversations, keep what conversations are initiated by others short, not liking to be in the spotlight and being quite passive unless he realises something quite bad may happen if he doesn't speak up (such as a diabetic classmate having hypoglycemia and two other classmates having a fight right in front of the closest source of sweet edibles). The few times he's the one approaching Melissa, he later turns to have been mentally preparing for it for a surprising amount of time. In his romantic route, he has trouble believing Melissa is actually interested in him because he considers himself to not have an attractive personality.
- Situational Sociability: Kyler and Shoji, who both have personality traits that result in Hates Small Talk, can get surprisingly talkative if asked about a topic in which they are interested. As Shoji is bonded with over a common interest in gaming, he turns out to also be more sociable online.
- Stern Teacher: As a person, Augustin is just as affable as his nephew, Hendrik. At the same time, the lectures he gives students who make mistakes while excavating are dreaded, because said mistakes can have a great impact on how relevant excavated items are to further research.
- Stupidity Is the Only Option: The first event giving Melissa an equal chance to raise affection with all five love interests happens because she loses her emergency hard candy while taking a risky shortcut to make up for an unexpected detour in her morning jog that also made her miss breakfast. The player's only choice prior to the event is Melissa's rationale for using the shortcut.
- Summer Romance: Any romance started during the game is at the very least a long-term version, as such runs end with a Fast-Forward to Reunion in which Melissa's new romantic partner comes to visit her in the USA during the winter vacation that follows the summer during which the game is set.
- Sure, Let's Go with That: This trope gets played around with when it comes to dealing with an accidental Forced Out of the Closet moment. In-game context and the wording used make it so that it's technically possible to understand the statement accidentally outing a third party as something else entirely. From an audience perspective, Melissa makes it sound like she misunderstood, which allows the person who let the information slip to pretend that the misunderstood information was what they meant and get out of the conversation gracefully. Once this happens, Melissa turns out to have actually understood the information correctly and to have pretended otherwise for the other person's sake. This causes the trope to have a subversion that doubles as a reveal that it was invoked.
- Tattoo Conceals Scars: Dating Hendrik will result in seeing a piece of dialog in which he mentions getting extra tattoos on his arm to cover the scars he got in the car accident to which he lost his hand.
- Teacher/Student Romance: Hendrik's romantic route is technically this, as pointed out when he and Melissa admit to each other's feelings. However, at that point, the situation only has one week left to go, so they decide to keep things professional up to then and use the time to think it over.
- Tempting Fate: Deandre is taking the class because he's missing exactly one class worth of credits and mentions several times that getting a passing grade is all he needs to do to be done with his education. Take a wild guess as to how the game makes him stick around for the full eight weeks when the class only requires four.
- Through His Stomach: Several romance routes and some friendship routes involve one of the love interests at the very least buying a meal for Melissa. Melissa sometimes makes something simple for the other person, while Deandre and Hendrik use their cooking skills for something more elaborate. The trope name is even dropped in the late-game choice that puts the player on Deandre's romantic route.
- Tuck and Cover: If Melissa happens to be in the cave on the day a heat lamp gets accidentally toppled and falls in her square, she keeps Kyler from getting hurt via jumping on top of him to get him out of the way. The gesture is needed in part because Kyler usally works with his cochlear implant turned off, making him oblivious to both noise from the lamp itself and verbal warnings.
- Viewers Are Geniuses: Hendrik's seldom-encountered sexual orientation is properly depicted, but said depiction assumes that the player is just as informed about it as the game's creators are:
- The recurring mentions of cake are a nod to a joke within the community that its members would rather eat cake than have sex with another person.
- The orientation's shortened name is "ace", but that only gets spelled out late in his romantic route, which causes some earlier scenes to be a little obscure for players who don't already know this.
- His obliviousness to both flirting (his own and that of other people) and the innuendos he makes while talking about geology are meant to be hints to the fact that sex is not a place his brain goes to easily.
- The mere fact that Hendrik is in love with Melissa, but also not attracted to her in a sexual way in his romantic route flies in the face of a common misconception about the orientation.
- Even dialogue from after Hendrik and Melissa become a couple beats around the bush when it comes to the orientation's defining element, which is a lacking or outright absent sexual attraction towards other people. The same happens with its most frequent direct consequence and the reason it's a potential issue in a romantic relationship: rarely to never being in the mood to engage in intercourse (even with a romantic partner), and most people considering the lack of sex in a romance a dealbreaker. Because of those things, Melissa's reaction to Hendrik booking them two nights in a high-end hotel catering to couples (which implies he's ready to have sex with her as an affectionate gesture), in his romantic route's epilogue can be hard to understand, as well.
- Walking Techbane: Shoji's father can cause an electronic device to stop working merely by touching it. His mother's field of expertise is repairing electronics. As one can guess, things worked out well for them. However, it's a good thing that his father has his own job very far away from his mother's repairshop. According to an optional piece of dialog, the man's personal laptop manages to have something go wrong with it once a week.
- You Must Be Cold: In Kyler's romantic route, he and Melissa have campfire dinner together. Kyler brings his hoodie, Melissa doesn't. When it starts getting cold enough for Melissa to start regretting the latter, Kyler saves her a trip to her tent by lending her his.
- Now, go clean all those tropes in the lab.
