The dating sim genre is highly influential in the video game industry, but it hasn’t always gotten the respect it deserves. In fact, I often find myself frustrated that these games that I love so dearly are often reduced to parody and jokes by developers. After playing the Grave Seasons demo at PAX East 2026, it was refreshing to find out that the developer Perfect Garbage and publisher Blumhouse Games share the same respect for the dating sim genre, even as they put their own spin on it.
When I sat down with Emmett Nahil, the narrative designer and co-founder of Grave Seasons developer Perfect Garbage, at PAX East 2026, I was quick to explain my love for the dating sim genre. It was a love that he shared. “We feel the same, essentially. It’s a little unfortunate that [dating sims do] get clowned on every once in a while, but for us, we actually got our start in dating sims and visual novels,” Nahil explained.
“Grave Seasons is our second title. Our first is Love Shore, which is a cyberpunk neo noir visual novel dating sim. And so we come from those roots as a studio, and we find it to be a really rich vein in terms of branching narrative and RPG-esque structures as well too. As a narrative designer and as a writer, I also find romance to be just a rich thematic vein regardless of what genre it is, and the fact that dating sims happen to highlight that genre.”
Those strengths also what make dating sims an easy target for developers who have a bit less respect for them. “I think that is what makes them special, but also what makes them a genre that can be easily parodied, and so we want to take those elements that already exist in farming sims and give them a little bit more narrative weight and respect the players who are interested in the visual novel and also dating sim mechanics too by really integrating them into the world itself.”