I ended up playing a lot of mobile games while I was stuck in bed waiting for and then recovering from surgery. I mean A LOT. Some of them I played for half an hour and went, “Nah, this is bullshit,” and deleted it. But I wanted to *try* tons of stuff.
One of the things I got really fascinated with as a writer is the choose-your-own-adventure/romance/otome genre. (You start to see plot and character tropes within the genre if you play enough of them. So many beating hearts clenching in your chest, omg)
Someday I’d like to find a plot tree structure—there’s got to be templates on the internet somewhere—and try my hand at something like that. Some stories branch more than others; some just give you dialogue options that barely even ripple the plot.
Shoutout to Lovestruck, the single most LGBT-friendly story/romance game I’ve found. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but it’s the only one I’ve seen with non-binary love interests, and it specifically gives you a sidebar of LGBT character recs.
Also, Lovestruck just added a new LADY VAMPIRE HUNTER character today to my favorite series, so that’s a good time. New character additions seem to have been a better balance of male and female; not sure when a new NB character will arrive.
Interestingly, your POV character in the Havenfall series refers to herself, multiple times, as specifically being bisexual. In Villainous Nights, your character refers to herself as lesbian in the Andi (female) route. Like, there’s distinct identities being represented.
Anyway, I was fascinated by all of this, in itself and in comparison to other games. I’m tempted to write up some kind of post or review.
There’s a lot of material to cover, though, because I am gonna date eVERY SINGLE CHARACTER IN THIS GAME, SO HELP ME. That’s a lot of “the cold dude! the bro dude! the flirty dude! the gentleman! one hot lady!” to work through, let me tell you
THREAD UPDATE: I am getting further game recs in my mentions, and will report back after I try some. There are other games with NB options out there, and I’m now told that the Arcana devs have said that Asra is also NB (I wasn’t sure).
I mention gender(s) rep because it seems like something a number of y’all would be interested in. However, I am also testing out translated-from-Japanese otome games that are just dudes, dudes giving you cardiac arrest, dudes as far as the eye can seeeee
You are living in a house with a group of samurai/a boy band/a bunch of princes/mononoke/devils/gangsters/butlers and you must CHOOSE ONE, RIGHT NOW! But you will live with all of them and they will tease you 24/7. You may or may not get to play dress-up.
Generally I just read free sample chapters of these, because they’re more likely to be pay-to-play. There is a game I really wanted to try called Scarlet Fate that had a beautiful opening, but that’ll have to be later.
I think that’s mostly a writerly interest, though; the very predictability of the tropes reveals the underlying structure to you, and, having learned it, you could then play with that and subvert it.
GAMING UPDATE: I just tried this out and it’s amazing. The samurai theme of several other games I’d looked at, plus the gameplay format of Midnight Cinderella, but with vastly better art.
You are a fashion design student who has fallen through a spacetime wormhole, as you do, and accidentally changed the course of history. Also you are explaining consent to a 16th-century warlord. He believes the time-travel thing once he goes through your purse, though 
