A few years ago, I found myself in a lonely portion of my adulthood where absolutely nothing was happening. Without getting into it, it was a very introspective period that left me hyper-aware of the things that were affecting me. It was probably very scarring on my mental health, but that’s beside the point. During that period, I had the premise of the game, Chulip, explained to me, and immediately took to the internet to scoop up a brand-new copy of my own.

The feelings I had when I first played Chulip linger on to this day. I still remember keeping reading material nearby for when I was waiting for an event to occur, and I recall being drawn in by its shocking depth. I’ve carried the experience with me for years, never forgetting the characters I met and the situations that perplexed me. It was tremendously impactful on my view of world building. Beyond that, it altered the way I look at things. And all I had to do was kiss a few dozen people.

PUCKER UP

Chulip is, from head to toes, a game about smooching. You play as a poor schoolboy who moves to a new town and is immediately smitten by a local girl. However, when he attempts to plant one on her, she chastises him for being inexperienced and having no reputation. Far below her standards for kissing. His only course of action is to raise his profile by kissing everyone he can get his lips on. No, really.

That’s the whole plot. Kiss people until the person you want to kiss will let you kiss them. Before long, a carrot is dangled in your face in the form of three pieces of a letter writing set that you need to obtain to write a love letter, but you have to kiss people on the way there. There are townsfolk you’ll get to know who have their own schedules and problems that you need to fix in order to get them to touch lips with you. However, you’ll be getting most of your smooches from the subterranean residents.

Yeah, see, for a reason that is only vaguely touched on as being related to deviancy in the Japanese school system, a number of strange characters live in holes beneath the city. They only emerge for short periods at specific times of the day, and it’s up to you to figure out when they’re hungry for a bit of smooching. Sometimes, it’s as simple as waiting for the right moment, other times, you need to perform some sort of action, like eating an eggplant in their presence, for them to pucker up.

THE KISSER’S DISEASE

That may sound cute and quirky, but make no mistake; Chulip will kill you. There’s no combat, but it will kill you frequently, suddenly, and without apology. No aspect of its design is more shocking than its willingness to throw you to a game over screen.

See, you can’t just plant one on whoever you feel like, you first need to meet certain criteria. If you try to kiss them, or sometimes even get near them when they’re not open to it, you’ll get a firm slap across the face. Consent, guy, it’s important to be sure. The amount of damage you take varies depending on the character throwing fingers, but some of their slaps are downright deadly. If you don’t have the heart to take that kind of shame, you just drop dead.

You can die from things besides kissing, too. Jump on the playground equipment, and you’ll suffer some damage. Go through the trashcan and find poop instead of treasure, and your dirty hands will cause such embarrassment that you suffer some damage. Try to walk home past your curfew, and you could be gunned down by the police or murdered by your local doctor. Sometimes you’ll take damage in the process of just doing what you’re intended to do. It’s a hazardous world for a boy with such a fragile ego.

Save early, save often.

This is mostly a problem at the start of the game when you don’t have much health. As you kiss more people, you level up and gain more hearts. That enables you to take bigger risks, but the threat of an embarrassing death never goes away. Sometimes you need to cut your excursions out into the world short, because healing by chomping food is prohibitively expensive, and the only way to fully heal is to sleep at home.

WAITING FOR A TRAIN

The world is going to be a make-or-break deal with a lot of people, since it’s equally unfriendly. Chulip’s world is actually one of the least bizarre things in it. Instead, it grounds a lot of the game’s weirdness by being realistically mundane. It’s broken into four distinct sections, all connected by train. The train runs on a schedule, and they don’t run at night. So to get from one place to another, it sometimes means actually waiting for the train to arrive. You can even become stranded at night with nothing to occupy the time. There’s even a transfer you need to take to get to the furthest point on the map. This can lead to a lot of just waiting.

There are in-game comic books that you can read to instantly push the time ahead, but I got more mileage of actually having something (maybe actual comic books) on hand to distract myself while waiting for the train. Usually I played another game on my DS or read old issues of Nintendo Power.

This gets worse the further you go into the game. At the beginning, you can wander around and simply run into people emerging from their holes in the ground. After you’ve chapped the majority of lips out there and are approaching the end of the game, you may be left sitting beside one of the few remaining holes, waiting for its inhabitant to finally pop out. The time frame that they’re above ground might be incredibly brief, so if you can’t figure out how to romance them in time, you may be left waiting a day for another opportunity. It’s about 1 minute for every in-game hour, so 24 minutes to wait for a day to pass, if it runs uninterrupted. You don’t have to kiss everyone, mind you, but who can resist those pillowy lips?

It doesn’t help that the solutions to some of the game’s puzzles are ridiculously obtuse. Some of them are made more obtuse by the game’s spotty translation. You’re given hints if you peek into a resident’s home during off hours, but the hints are only sometimes helpful. You can also trade business cards so you can show other townsfolk to hear rumours about the person. But it can get so mystifying that there’s actually a miniature guide printed in the back of the instruction manual that you can follow to make things easier. I’d suggest only using it if you get stuck, but I’m not the boss of you.

THESE LIPS ARE MADE FOR KISSING

The bizarre premise and strange characters may be what draws you in, but for me, it was the human side of things that opened my heart. In spite of how strange the inhabitants are, a lot of them have really relatable, human problems, and helping them come to terms is what I found to be the most rewarding part of the game.

There are simpler, superficial situations, such as a quack doctor who can’t get his sleep schedule under control or a man who had his prized statue stolen by a crane, but then it gets a bit deeper and darker. Take, for example, the man who loves creating music but can’t make a career out of it, so he needs a soul-crushing job. Or perhaps the woman who bottles up all her emotions, leaving her a hateful, spiteful mess. How about the sad tale of the washed-up director who is unable to leave behind his glory days and whose lazy habits are exacerbating a toxic relationship with his verbally abusive wife? Or maybe the uptight bathhouse owner whose high school sweetheart tragically died before graduation. Maybe you’d like to sit down to tea with her on some lonely night in the graveyard?

The characters are all deeply scarred, with many of their problems being due to their own human imperfections. Despite being so bizarrely designed, they come across as entirely realistic. When you get down to the bare bones of Chulip, it’s a game primarily about helping people. On the surface, it may sound like this strange society values people based on a lifetime of ceaseless promiscuity, but in reality, it’s about getting people to open their hearts to you.

Speaking of flawed, however, and as mentioned before, the translation seems a little half-done. There are a bunch of typos to trip over, and certain facets, like the silent movies that you can watch at night, haven’t even been touched, leaving their Japanese text as the only way to decipher them. At least one puzzle requires some knowledge of the Japanese rail system. The localization is functional, but that’s about it.

UNDERSTANDING LOVE

Chulip is going to be a game that not everyone gets. It’s deeply unfriendly; killing you without apology and leaving you to wait at the train station because it’s too deeply invested in presenting a world with all its problems and flaws.

Yeah, and you know what? That’s what Chulip and love have in common; they’re both imperfect, sometimes frustrating, yet deeply worthwhile experiences. It’s about looking past the flaws that scar the surface and finding the fulfilling parts beneath. It’s about accepting that sometimes you have to make sacrifices to get what you need. Nothing worthwhile comes without effort.

Of course, maybe Chulip’s just not your type. Maybe you’re just out looking for a good time, and don’t want to dig just to find it. That’s fine, I guess. There’s nothing wrong with that. For me, Chulip just feels right. I’ll endure its claws, because I like how it digs into me. It sets my imagination on fire and lets me live in a world that feels like home. And I’m willing to look past its problems and give it a big smackeroo.

9/10

This review was conducted on a software backwards compatible PS3 using a disc copy of the game. It was paid for by the author.