Tony Hawk’s Queer Tamil Relationship Trauma – Thirsty Suitors Review

Developer: Outerloop Games | Platform: PS5 | Playtime and Platinum: 13:20

~ Mild story spoilers within this review, reader discretion is advised ~

Thirsty Suitors is a game that sells on concept alone – a bombastic game where you must fight your ex partners ala Scott Pilgrim in “Psychosexual Mind Dramas” with turn based RPG mechanics. I was enamoured from day 1.

The story follows Jala, 25 year old Half Indian Half Sir Lankan, all disaster, who after breaking up with her runaway girlfriend Jennifer returns to the small Pacific Northwest town of Timber Hills to repair relationships with the family she left behind and make amends with many ex partners from her past. Jala is a very messy person, so these issues aren’t going to be solved over coffee. She’s hurt a lot of people and needs to do a lot to win each of them back.

Timber Hills is not a big area at all, in fact you’ll spend your time between two main areas – Timber Hills Town and the Bearfoot Park skate area, with your house being the place to progress the days and advance the story (as well as cooking challenges, more on those later). The town does have a Store to purchase items from as well as a garage and bar for story stuff and some mini games (QTE’s that don’t have any rewards tied to them, meaning they’re a bit of a flavourless flavour). You’ll get around these areas on Skateboard, only walking when inside. The skateboard controls do take a little getting used to, finicky as they are but honestly if the game gave you the option to walk and get on the skateboard like a vehicle, you’d probably skateboard everywhere so really it’s just cutting out the middle man. Personally I would have liked one, maybe two more areas of a similar size to make the game feel a little bigger. I know this is meant to be a small town and the claustrophobic feeling does suit the theme, but does nothing for the gameplay.

On the topic of gameplay, this is an RPG with turn based combat and this is where you’ll spend a lot of the game. The combat is sort of RPG lite, a way to convey conflicts but not requiring players to be familiar with the intricacies of this combat style. Jala is the sole party member, and she will face no more than 3 opponents at one time, mostly one but sometimes 2. You have your standard health bar and mana bar, referred to in game as Willpower. Thirsty Suitors main gimmick in combat is a play on the standard elements system. With timed button presses, Jala can inflict “Moods” on her opponents – “Thirsty”, Shocked, Raging and more. These all have a passive effect like causing the enemy to skip a turn, but they’re all fairly similar in execution. The main purpose of moods is to inflict them, then use a move corresponding to that type. In layman’s – give them a fire weakness, use a fire move. Not every enemy has the same mood weakness meaning you’ll have to find out which one will work. That being said, the mood immunities and weaknesses don’t apply to the moves themed around them which means if you so choose you could quite easily not engage with the games main mechanic. The player can of course use items to restore health or willpower, but Jala’s most basic attack (which never changes) restore WP too, meaning you’ll never be left without. Throughout the game, you’ll unlock summons, including your mam rather amusingly, but these too are barely balanced. By the end of the game you will have access to 5 summons, and there’s no cost nor penalty for using them, and they recharge after every fight. Every encounter you can just spam summons and win. The exes are the main bosses of the game but you will also have to fight grunts. There’s no random encounters, instead the player can interact with icons in the world to initiate fights. These are against the skate park cultists or rather amusingly, the Suitors your Paati (Grandmother) have sent to try for an arranged marriage. There’s some variety there but not much – some enemies inflict mood on Jala but they suffer the same issues inversely. At the end of the day the damage received is just the damage received.

I think a lot of the issues that come with the gameplay is that this is mimicking RPG style, but lacks a lot of RPG staples – the party, the equipment. There’s very little need to strategize when you can brute force your way through every encounter without a modicum of strategy.

Aside from the games main plot of reconciling with Family and Exes, there’s a weird secondary plot regarding the youths of the town being suckered into a cult by an individual by the name of Soundie, a man in a bear mascot head from when the town was supposed to have a bear themed amusement park built next to it. Apart from being the way to access the game’s skateboarding challenges and giving Tyler (the main ex) a reason to interact with Jala, this plot line doesn’t really go anywhere and is resolved without much fanfare. I think the intention was for Jala to make amends to the town as a whole, being an Auntie (the older maternal figure in a community) to the teenagers of Timber Hills, but that’s me extrapolating from very little.

Soundie is linked to the Skateboarding challenges, another fairly big part of the game. In the skate park and later the town square, you’ll unlock challenges that give customisation rewards (Jala’s jacket, shoes and skateboard). There’s nothing too fancy here – point challenges, collectathons, the floor is lava. They’re fun, but not too involved. There are things Jala can interact with in the world like a Darts board or a dumbbell. There are the button combo sequences for these but nothing happens, these could have been little minigames just to add to the world.

I’ve saved the best of the gameplay until last – Cooking. Hot off the heels of playing Venba, I was ready to make more traditional South East Asian cuisine. This involves the same kind of quick button pressing of the combat but at a much faster pace. This isn’t the gentle cooking of Venba, this is Gordon Ramsey’s acrobat kitchen, complete with a risk and reward heat system that allows you to use the points you earn for harder button combos but a higher ranking. If you’re feeling particularly bold, you can even try praising your Mam and see if Lady Luck is on your side or if she’ll see straight through you.

And this where the game really shines. The review so far might sound fairly negative and I suppose it has been. The problems mentioned above are only in retrospect, in the moment to moment they’re fine. The games strongest elements, the things I’m yet to mention and don’t want to delve too far into for spoiler reasons, are the story, dialogue, voice acting and characters – all of which are phenomenal. Jala, despite being a snarky asshole, is really trying to make things right. The exes – each of them close to caricature at first, all have deeper motivations and reasons behind their actions. Her relationship with Jala led her to being disowned by her parents for example. The narrative and characters manage to wrangle heavier themes like self-identity, generational trauma, moving on, self-reflection, relationships, religious, ethnic complexities and more while never losing the bombastic charm of the characters and premise. While my upbringing and family life is much different to that on the marginally exaggerated one of Jala’s, I see myself in the character – not with exes but with friends. Same self-doubts and hurdles to overcome. Same feelings about family and the importance of found family. It’s incredible the game manages all this while also having a skateboarding bear mascot.

If you’re judging Thirsty Suitors on it’s gameplay alone, you’ll find a decent enough game. Judge it as the entire game, the experience that it is and you’ll find nothing like it anywhere else. Genuine and sweet, sour and heartbreaking all wrapped in genuine cultural love. All of which is reason enough to give the game a try.