Lovephobia feels like coming back to your hometown after a fucked up Erasmus year, hungover, horny, and a bit too honest. You walk through this tiny place where everyone kind of knows each other, everyone pretends they don’t, and your dick is always two bad choices ahead of your brain. The game throws you back after a year abroad, and suddenly every girl you left behind has her own agenda, new habits, maybe new guys, and definitely new secrets. It’s that classic “welcome home” vibe where the first thing you see isn’t your parents or your bed, it’s some side girl already getting railed in an alley picture you can’t avoid, like the dev personally slaps you with: “yeah, this world exists even when you’re not here.” That one image is like a warning sign and a teaser at same time, and it sets the tone better than any boring story intro.
What I liked is how the routes feel more like different realities where you either decide to be present in someone’s life or you just… don’t, and the game doesn’t stop for you. You go for the main girl’s love route and you really can lock yourself into this safe little bubble with her, where NTR doesn’t touch you, and the drama is more “are we honest with each other” than “who is fucking her behind the bar.” There’s this one moment early when you walk her home, small talk about your year away, and if you actually pick the soft, honest answers, her eyes kinda change in the next scene, like she finally lets herself treat you as the guy who came back for her, not just some tourist visiting his old save file. Then you play a different route, ignore her scenes, and suddenly that same walk never happens, and your attention goes to the wrong girl at the convenience store, the one who tells you about her “friend with benefits” like she’s ordering coffee. You still flirt anyway, because of course you do, and later you see just how far that “friend” situation already went without you. It’s hot and annoying in equal parts. Some of the side stories can be avoided if you don’t poke around, but curiosity is a bitch, and the game knows it. One second you click a harmless looking choice, next second you watch her getting pinned against a wall by someone who isn’t you, and you’re sitting there going “ok I did this to myself but also fuck you, game.”
The funny thing is, it’s not really an NTR game and not really a comfy vanilla game either, it just refuses to pick a side. Like, you can play it as a sweet, almost wholesome romance with the main girl, focus on your route, keep your dick loyal, and the world behaves. No cheating on you in your storyline, nothing stolen from your hands. But if you start sniffing around side girls because you liked that one scene in some hentai you saw on Fakku, the game shrugs and says “fine, then you’re gonna watch what happens when you are not her priority.” Sometimes you’re the second choice. Sometimes you were never in the race. Sometimes there’s a girl who looks like a love interest, acts like a love interest, but she is just not on the table, and the game doesn’t nicely label it. I actually respect that, even if mid-game I wanted to throw my phone when one of the girls suddenly mentions other plans in a casual text, like when someone messages you on Telegram at midnight with “sorry I’m busy” and you just know she’s not knitting. There is one tiny thing that annoyed me for no good reason: a background detail in a cafe scene that never matters, never gets mentioned, it’s just there, crooked, in every visit, like the dev forgot it, and now my brain keeps going back to that instead of the tits on screen. Anyway, Lovephobia plays like a small town sex network where your choices decide how much of the mess you see and how close you stand to it. Or maybe it’s the other way around. I’m not even sure anymore, but I still clicked every scene like a degenerate archaeologist brushing dust off other people’s bad decisions.