Dating sim meets survival horror: the game that exposes pick-up artists

A dating sim with a difference, artist Angela Washko's The Game: The Game exposes the manipulative horror of extreme seduction by getting the player to experience it from the woman's point of view

It's Friday night, and it's been a long day. You're a young woman walking into a bar, looking for your friends, when a man you don't know walks up to you, grabs you, and pulls you close. "SPIN," he says intensely, turning you in a circle. It's a command, not a request. When you try to pull away, he feigns sadness for a moment, furrowing his brow, and then declares his love for you, a look of pain in his eyes. "Don't embarrass me," the man growls, and tries to pull you towards the door, toward a cab, towards his apartment, even as you resist.

Welcome to The Game: The Game, where a dating sim is transformed into survival horror by filtering "romance" through the lens of "pick-up artists", a lucrative but emotionally deformed community where poorly adjusted and manipulative men teach others how to extract sex from women at all costs. In a traditional dating sim, you'd be presented with a variety of romantic interests, and encouraged to choose the one you like the most. In The Game, as in pick-up artistry at large, it's not about what you want; instead, you're presented with several men willing to do a wide range of things to get you into bed, each of them based on a real-life leader in the seduction community, and tailored to his specific approach.