Yandere Simultator - This Game is Hilarious

Having been swamped with school, I've had about -38 hours for playing video games.

But recently, I've started watching Markiplier videos on YouTube where he records himself playing games, adding in his commentary over the gameplay. If you haven't seen him before, I highly recommend you check him out on YouTube (especially the horror games playthroughs). I bring him up because that is where I was first exposed to what is, by far, the most ridiculously amusing game I've seen yet: Yandere Simulator.

For a little background on the game, yandere is a character archetype in Japanese media that is typified by an outwardly innocent person who has a deep and destructive affection for someone. On the outside a yandere character will appear meek, sweet, or outgoing and innocent. However, they harbor an obsessive love for someone that typically escalates into brutal violence. For a yandere, it's not enough to have the affection of their beloved. No one else can have any affection for them. Senpai refers to an upperclassman. In school settings, lower year students refer to their seniors as senpai.

The game centers around a girl named Ayano Aishi, who is referred to in the game as Yandere-chan. This is a girl who, due to some sort of hereditary illness, is incapable of feeling human emotions. She's just dead on the inside....until she attends high school and meets Taro Yamada, her senpai, for the first time. It's love at first sight, if by love you're talking about a biochemical addiction that leads to paranoia and fear of possibly losing out on your sense of euphoria. She simply can't live without senpai being hers.

Except she can't ever muster up the courage to talk to senpai, and if she tries to go anywhere near him, she has horrible anxiety that manifests as weird behavior to her beloved Taro. If she spends too much time near him, he will be visibly shaken by her presence and swears her off entirely. So she must pine for him at a distance. Unfortunately, that opens the door for other girls in her class (and a particularly lascivious substitute teacher) to try to snatch Senpai out from under her. This, of course, cannot be allowed to happen. Ever. As the introduction screen to the main game states in Yandere-chan's voice: "Senpai will be mine. He doesn't have a choice."

^{You'll have to take care of each of these rivals to win Senpai's heart!}

The game tasks players with finding ways to dissuade her rival for Senpai's affection from pursuing that affection, and a new rival shows up every week after the previous rival is dealt with. There are a number of diplomatic ways of ensuring that senpai will only have eyes for Yandere-chan: the player can focus on getting their rival expelled from the school, they can find someone else for their rival to fall in love with, or they can befriend their rival and help them out of a really rough situation. That last one isn't technically diplomatic because of the rather grisly manner in which it concludes, but it's arguably the most involved method of dispatching of one of your rivals.

Or a player can take the path of violence in what is easily the most creative death simulation since The Sims. Yandere-chan, being completely devoid of emotions toward any other human being except for Senpai, has no compunction about killing. And boy can she kill other students. There are a plethora of weapons she can choose, from a knife or box cutter, to a katana, to a training dumbell. It's also possible in the latest build of the game to light your rivals on fire, poison them, electrocute them, and drown them in the toilet, as well as a number of environmental ways to kill, such as pushing your rival off the roof and framing it to look like a suicide. My personal favorite thing, though, is kidnapping another student, torturing them in your basement until their mind breaks and they become a slave, and then sending them to kill your rival before killing their self. Wew lad.

There are also clubs at school you can join which confer certain benefits, such as use of costumes and masks in the Drama Club, or the ability to summon demonic entities in the Occult Club. Since this is set in a school, Yandere-chan must also attend school or be expelled for missing too much class, and each subject in class unlocks different abilities that allow her to more expediently dispatch her enemies or convince other students to do her bidding.

There is also another student called Info-chan, a shadowy information broker at the school who can help set up her rivals for something as simple as having a pack of cigarettes in their backpack to framing them for murder.

This game is still in alpha testing mode, and there are bugs and glitches, but it is...breathtaking. Not because the graphics are amazing, though I definitely credit YandereDev with how much time and effort he put into developing the school environment, nor because the gameplay is incredibly innovative, though I credit the dev in that department as well for refining the game mechanics and making them supremely satisfying. No, this game is breathtaking because it is fun as hell. Discussions aside about the appropriateness of depicting ultra violence in a school setting, this game is just fun to play. In the same way it was fun to discover all the strange and macabre ways you could kill your creations in The Sims series, this game allows you to take that task on first-hand. There is a certain simplicity to the task of killing, but there's also the clean-up and the cover up of the crime to make sure you're not discovered. With a new narrative implemented and deeper character backgrounds, you can actually connect with the story and really get invested into Yandere-chan's twisted romance.

At the moment, my laptop is so sad that it can't play the game at any more than 9 frames a second, but I'm getting my hands on a tower that's going to really let me dig into it. Once I get that up and running, I think I'm going to record some of my own playthrough videos. I hope you enjoy them as much as I'll enjoy making them.

Note: all images used are either in-game footage or promotional materials used with the permission of their owner: YandereDev.

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