You probably clicked on that headline to wonder just what in the deuce a PvP dating sim is about. Well we unfortunately can’t tell you from first-hand experience, but we can share what indie developer Optillusion Games has provided to highlight Pick Me Pick Me, a two-player battle of wits that sees players try their best to win the hearts of NPC love interests.
In Pick Me Pick Me, players will get to dress their avatar up in a variety of outfits, then meet different characters ranging from male to female (with furry characters planned later), all of which utilize an LLM AI bot that will power that character’s reactions to what players type. This means that literally anything can be used in the chat, whether it’s attempts at being suave, being clever, or defaming the opponent. Players can also use skill cards to throw off their rival, engaging effects like awkward accidents, mind reading, or causing the enemy player to “babble like an idiot.”
Here’s where things get a bit dodgy, however: According to the game’s FAQ, the LLM bot that powers NPC interactions incurs a cost against Optillusion for every generated response, which necessitates players to purchase and use a currency known as tokens that are spent whenever anything is typed to a potential date. “While we would like to shoulder that cost ourselves, the current price for interfacing with these models is beyond what we can handle,” the studio admits.
Purchase of the game offers up enough tokens for “about 30-40 hours” of gameplay, players can still interact until the battle is decided if tokens are all used up mid-match, and a game host can elect to eat all token costs themselves, but ultimately this will be monetized for literally every message that’s typed after a certain point – and there are no details on how much any of this costs.
Furthermore, Optillusion points out that the number of copies of the game has to be limited so that player concurrency doesn’t overwhelm the AI bot with too many response requests. So there’s that to consider as well.
Purchase of the game does grant a free copy to give to a friend in order to have someone to duel with, but yet again the cost of the game isn’t provided anywhere, let alone a store to buy the thing (though it was playable at PAX West). So while this idea might sound novel, perhaps just realize what it is you’re getting in to from a monetary standpoint.
