Giantess Dating Sim Review – Horror Disguised As Love

Have you ever thought about dating a giant woman? Well, SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim isn’t actually about that. Instead, what you get is a terrifying dive into a messed up situation where cowering in fear is the norm.

The World Inside the Shelf

Starting with the obvious, SAEKO is not actually a dating sim. The game’s a horror-styled text adventure with point-and-click controls and slight simulation elements.

You assume the role of Rin, a young man with feminine features to the point of being confused with a girl. One day, he wakes up and sees a giant woman.

However, she was actually a normal-sized woman, he was the one who shrunk. As a tiny man, he starts living in one of Saeko’s drawers and soon finds himself among other small people.

Rin becomes a supervisor who has to give items to his tiny colleagues and get to know them. While it may seem like a mundane task, there’s a particular reason for this.

Your choices will have significant consequences for group harmony and impact each character’s statistics. Everyone has values for Appeal and Health, and it’s essential to get one of them above 45 appeal every day through your actions.

Spoiler Warning: In Her Hands

Unfortunately, there’s no way to truly dive into what makes SAEKO so appealing without going into some spoiler territory. I’ll try to keep it as light as possible, but I’ll still have to address the big elephant in the room.

The whole situation is much creepier than the concept may seem at first glance. By giving food to the tiny people, you pick one of them as a sacrifice for Saeko, giving the others a chance to live another day.

Every day new people come in and you have no choice but to pick one to die. Sometimes, it may be better to choose someone based on their small health. However, you’re still the one who “selects Saeko’s snacks,” no matter how you justify it as a means of survival.

It’s a hopeless situation where your life and those of the others are just a frail thing and this dreadful feeling permeates the whole experience. In fact, making a poor choice or irritating Saeko leads to game over very fast, and it’s easy to fall prey to it multiple times during the story.

Intermissions

After being done with your duties for the day, Saeko will call Rin for a more intimate meeting. During these moments, the two have a short chat alone, which is mostly carried as a one-sided monologue for the giant girl to relieve some stress.

Despite the little possibility of interaction from the player, Saeko still wants to feel their presence. As such, we have the opportunity to click on bubbles with mostly simple replies, such as “Yeah”, “No”, or “Uh”. However, at times and depending on what the player picks, more detailed interactions may show up.

Generally speaking, it’s usually necessary to answer her questions. Being too quiet during those will irritate her and lead her to question if the player is even paying attention to the conversation. However, replying too much when unprovoked will also be seen as noisy and anger her.

An interesting aspect of these conversations is that they’re time-sensitive. The letters will fall down, and the player should only reply after she has finished. Interrupting her talk is another way to get Saeko mad. However, if the timing is a little too slow for you, there’s a button to fast-forward the experience a little. A pause button is also available if you need to stop playing for a while instead.

Beyond the pure gameplay side, being able to talk with Saeko helps flesh out her personal circumstances. She’s a deeply flawed human character, a messy individual whose actions may even be unforgivable, but that’s selling her too short. Instead, we get someone with a lot more nuance while not trying to “justify her wrong actions” like a Disney villain movie.

Choices here and inside the shelf matter and may lead to different endings or premature game overs. An interesting side effect of this is that, every day, we get to play with a cellphone and see different items depending on how things unfold.

The phone also holds other valuable little perks, like news of the outside world, a web novel and a mobile game about jumping up platforms as a skater. The skating game is a one-button (or click) experience that is very simple but addicting, with only three lives per in-game day to achieve your goal.

Fear and Lack of Choice

As a game with horror elements, SAEKO truly embodies fear in its visual choices. During most of the time all we get to see is a dark screen: the shelf is a world without light with just grey and white silhouettes. Only people have their faces showcase some color in their eyes, which is also part of the UI.

There are slight glitches intentionally used as animation for the people and the text box is also filled with a constantly-moving doodle line. Even when interacting with Saeko, the letters falling down and the choice of depicting replies as shaking bubbles contributes to setting their relationship as a hierarchical structure of power based on fear.

The soundtrack meanwhile opts for beats that end up reinforcing a feeling of alienation. It knows when to use silence but the tracks help with setting a tone of dread when needed or make the conversations with Saeko feel more intimate through lo-fi.

If there’s one point that may end up compromised, it’s how the Appeal and Health parameters feel like an underexplored gimmick. Much of the experience doesn’t truly revolve around choice, and this may impact how some people feel about the game as a whole.

However, these limitations are a truly important point of the story. Trapped within the boundaries of what SAEKO deems as necessary, the player is almost like a doll that can only find some freedom within its limited options.

A Thought-Provoking Life Alienation Sim

SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim is a truly exceptional narrative experience about being forced into a dreadful experience and learning more about the true self of a beautiful “giantess.” While the game subverts what a dating sim would actually be about, it provides a unique horror-fueled journey through arbitrary moral choices and human life alienation.