"Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator" Review - Yes, I went there - part 3

I can see the faces of all my readers now. And it's beautiful. It's what I review these dating sims for. Anyway. Dream Daddy comes to us from youtube content creators, "The Game Grumps." I don't personally watch them, but I watched half an hour of gameplay and found myself laughing like an idiot for most of it, so I thought, "why not?" and got it for myself. I am a man who is two things: 1) A critic with integrity and 2) Secure in his heterosexuality. Given how I kind of have a cringey dating simulator review series going (with Panzermadels and Stay! Stay! DPRK!), I decided to broaden the series a little bit and play this one! Was it a little uncomfortable? Yes. Does the title kind of make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up? Yes. But in the end, this series is about embracing the cringe and having a good time with it. Because it's a dating simulator, there isn't a lot to touch on, but there really isn't a lot to touch on here, so this will be the shortest review I've ever written. Let's do this!

In Dream Daddy, you play as a fully customizable father. At the start of the game, you and your High School Senior daughter, Amanda, are moving to a cul-de-sac on the other side of town. From there, you meet some of the other fathers in the neighborhood, become good friends with them, then let them hold you in their dad-ly embrace (shudder). While this is going on, you also help your daughter through the transition from High School to college. Dating sims are always light on the story, so that's about it. Before I continue, let me just say this: You and Amanda are a father-daughter team for the ages. It's a legitimately heartwarming relationship, and it made me "aww" a number of times. There's some really touching material here, and I was glad to see that effort went into actually making you feel like a dad.

There are 7 dads in the neighborhood to choose from: Robert, Craig, Hugo, Joseph, Brian, Mat, and Damien. Robert is the grizzled, enigmatic one, Craig is your old college roommate, Hugo is your daughter's english teacher, Joseph is the "cool youth minister" for the church, Brian is the dad who always has to one-up you, Matt is the owner of a local coffee shop, and Damien is...a vampire. Kind of. After the first half-hour or so, you're given access to "Dadbook," where you can message whoever you like and spend time with them. With that in mind, the game's length will vary depending on how broadly you spread your net. On the third "date," that's it, it's the last section of the game before the end. So, if you want this to last a long time, date around. I didn't take that into account, so I ended up staring out into the sunset with Joseph before I knew what hit me.
The content of these "dates" varies. Some of them test your instincts (such as how best to dance in a way that makes kids want to dance too), some of them involve actual minigames. As it stands, these minigames aren't very good, and they tend to be buggy, but I was impressed that they were incorporated in the first place.

This game's biggest strength is its sense of humor. Right from the get-go, you're greeted with a campy fade-in opening screen with a custom theme song playing in the background. On the character creation screen, a voice announces, "Build that Dad!" then "Name that Dad!" when you name your character. Throughout the game, the dialogue is just hilarious at times. There are so many puns and witty retorts that I spent most of the game laughing. The only issue here is that there are some jokes that just...linger. For instance, there comes a time when you might be on a yacht. In that event, you say that you don't trust whales, because nothing should be that big. That in itself isn't funny, but later when you start thinking about the fact that there are whales under you and the next text box says "Nothing should be that big," that's when the humor works. But then, the whale thing gets brought up like 10 more times, and it gets less and less funny each time. Having left quite a few avenues unexplored in this game, maybe it isn't a problem for other areas of the game. However, I, for one, noticed it happening quite a lot.

Dream Daddy's biggest flaw, in my opinion, is that it doesn't give you enough control over what your character says. There are more than a few times where you'll say something to make the conversation awkward without getting a choice. It'll always be preceded by "don't say it. Don't say it!", and you'll always end up saying it. I think it would've been better to have what you should or shouldn't say be vague, so you'd have to think about your words to try and keep it from getting awkward. For example, there's a segment where you talk to one of Joseph's sons and things are starting to get awkward. So, your character says, "How's the.....jeeeeeesus?" It would've been better to have a set of dialogue options, one of them being "How's your mom?" That option might cause the kid to say something about his parents' failing marriage, making the situation awkward. I'm sure this seems like a teeny tiny thing to harp on, but there isn't a lot to talk about here, and when there's not a lot to talk about, the small stuff starts to matter. It was frustrating to me that I could control what my character said, except when the developers decided what they thought of was funnier.

That's literally it. This is a dating simulator with a lot of content, but being a dating simulator, there aren't a lot of aspects to it. So, do I recommend Dream Daddy? It's going to depend on who you are. If you're a man, unless you're a critic with integrity or you don't mind braving the opposite side of the aisle for some legitimately quality humor, chances are you're not going to want to play this. If you're not, you know better than I do if you'd like this one. In the end, I actually enjoyed my time with Dream Daddy. Panzermadels is still the reigning champion in terms of my personal preference, but this game had so much more depth than any other dating sim I've reviewed. In what seems, on the surface, to be a dating simulator playing off of the whole "daddy"...phenomenon?....fixation?....anomaly?....whatever, that a lot of younger women on social media started embracing in late 2016 and early 2017, you get a truly touching father/daughter story, quality humor, and a sense of self-awareness that isn't irritating.

Let us review:

Low quality, buggy minigames - 0.3
Not enough control over the dialogue - 0.5

The final score for Dream Daddy: A Dad Dating Simulator is...

9.2/10 - Fantastic
Good work, Game Grumps, good work.