Interview with Akabaka | Sucker for Love: Crush Landing

I wanted to start by asking about your motivations and inspirations behind creating the series. I must admit, I’ve never discovered an Eldritch horror and thought of them as a dateable entity. What made you want to create the first Sucker for Love game? Did you ever expect it to grow into a series?

Sucker for Love was born out of a horror game anthology, The Dread X Collection 2, where about a dozen developers were invited to make a game in about two weeks fitting the collection’s theme “Lovecrafting” – a game that contained themes of love, crafting, and Lovecraftian horror.  As a visual novel developer who was invited to the collection after the producer at DreadXP tried out my demo for a different game, “CHROMATOSE”, I was kind of the odd one out. I hadn’t really made a horror game in the past, nor did I know anything about Lovecraftian horror besides a vague sense of what Cthulhu looked like.  Moreover, I could have accidentally wasted the entire development window just working on crafting mechanics, so I decided to try to try to break the premise down – creating and using items is kind of like crafting, and games that mix items with love mechanics are pretty narrowly dating sims.  

So then, the only missing piece of the puzzle was Lovecraftian horror. So, my submission would be a dating sim about eldritch horrors! This would let me play to my strengths with anime art styles and visual novel-style dialogue. I was very fearful that my bright pink horror game wouldn’t be understood, or that, because all of the other developers in the collection were seasoned veterans, that there would be some X factor to making horror games that I just didn’t know because I hadn’t tried to make one yet. But I think the timing worked out perfectly – Doki Doki Literature Club had just released, so everybody was all primed and ready for pastel anime games that look innocuous but are secretly high-horror underneath its malibu-pink packaging. I really didn’t expect it to be a runaway hit at all, I was mainly just praying that it wouldn’t be seen as the game made by the only developer in the collection who didn’t “get it”.  After the success of the game in the collection, I was invited to turn the game into a full trilogy. 

When you were brainstorming each game, what did the creative process behind character creation look like? Each dateable character is so unique in looks, and so charming, I'm curious to hear about the design of each and whether you faced any challenges during the process. 

The thing that all the eldritch characters have in common is that they were designed to very strongly resemble their inspirations. The idea was, that if I showed a lineup of my characters and the gods that they were inspired by, that my parents (with no knowledge of my game nor H.P. Lovecraft’s gods) would be able to match them correctly.  The characters with the easiest prompts, such as the King in Yellow – a guy in a yellow robe –  were actually the hardest to design to be recognizable, and ironically, the strictest source material ended up being the easiest to design, and possibly more iconic to the series, such as Ln’eta (Cthulhu) and Nyanlathotep (Nyarlathotep). Limitation bred creativity.  Also, generally, I start with a horror design and then try to make them cute – going straight from horror to romantically attractive got me into trouble a couple times early on where the resulting design was uncanny or creepy. But, even the scariest of horror mascots can be chibi-ified pretty safely. Keeping the characters and the subject matter relatively reserved added to the charm, in hindsight.  

In each of the Sucker for Love games, the core gameplay mechanics themselves are quite different, with Crush Landing standing out as the most unique in the trilogy. What made you want to stray from the routine in the previous two games?

That’s very core to the creative process that I try to follow when making games – figuring out what kind of story I want to tell, and then figuring out what mechanics best serve telling that particular story, regardless of genres and precedent. Starting with the genre or mechanics first puts the cart before the horse somewhat, because you’re already limiting yourself to games, genres, or mechanics that already exist without having thought about the story or characters or why this set of mechanics would best serve them. To make a comparison, it seems to me like going to the hardware store, buying the wood and supplies, and then trying to think of what you can make out of what you bought, as opposed to deciding what you want to build, and only buying the things that will help you make that, even if they’re in different aisles.  This mindset helped Sucker for Love develop its unique, somewhat oddball, identity. 

For context, First Date is about a guy who summons Ln’eta (Cthulhu) directly to his room in order to date her. Date to Die For is about a girl whose hometown has become overrun with cultists The Shadow Over Innsmouth-style and falls in love with the eldritch god that the cult themselves have summoned – Rhok’zan, the Black Goat of the Woods. These two are relatively similar stories – the main character encounters an eldritch god, and in carrying out rituals for their sake, they gradually earn their affection. Sucker for Love: Crush Landing is about an alien meteorite named Hheily (inspired by The Color Out of Space), crashing into the main character’s apartment. 

The meteorite is the ticket to the MC’s success, future, and fame, provided that it is kept alive by feeding it organic matter of various colors.  Already, this isn’t a god anymore, it’s an eldritch anomaly – so there’s no ritual book, no cultists, and no rituals because that doesn’t make sense.  Cthulhu has cultists, The Black Goat of the Woods has cultists, The Color Out of Space does not, so I needed to set aside the mainstay mechanics of the series for the good of Crush Landing’s integrity.  This is what I think drove Crush Landing to become something new and very much authentically itself – breaking from the safe formula and pursuing its true form.  In this aim, we achieved what we set out to do. Hheily’s color-draining puzzles and the related environmental storytelling – the effects that her radioactive alien presence has on living things around her – are so unique to just her and her story that I wouldn’t be able to recycle any of it even for a sequel.

One last note on this subject – when First Date first came out, I had the element of surprise. Nobody had any idea what genre it truly was at first glance, what surprise horror mechanics were tucked within, or the fact that I had written something meant to be touching underneath it all. Which gave me the opening I needed to teleport behind them like Sub-Zero and pull their heart out through their chest.  The second and third time around, people were ready and expecting it, so I had to change strategy (darn).  Basically, every time someone opens a new Sucker for Love game, I want them to be caught as off-guard as they were the very first time.  

Also, it is a bit of a waste of time for both myself and the players to do the same thing twice. I’m thirty-two, and these games take me two years apiece to make. If I make games without stopping until I’m sixty, it means I have fewer than fifteen games left in this lifetime. I don’t want to make First Date fifteen times. 

Hheily is one of the most human characters you’ve been able to date in the games, alongside Estir in First Date. But how did you come up with the idea to materialise The Color out of Space? 

Hheily and the Sentient Darkness were two of the trickiest characters to design in Sucker For Love’s history, because their source material was just so darn vague, general, and nebulous. Which, I know H.P. Lovecraft’s work says that right on the tin, but still. The Color Out of Space is an amorphous indescribable nebula emerging from a space rock, and so for a good portion of a game, that’s her form – a mote of glowing nebula with cute eyes. But, that form wasn’t particularly recognizable or original on its own. I needed a form that you could see anywhere and be like “Oh, that’s Hheily!” So, her human form, which she assumes from a swimsuit magazine model that the main character shows her, is a slight, airy, Urusei Yatsura-inspired girl who floats around like Lum and sounds like Rosalina from Mario Galaxy. 

Since she’s a friendly alien, shapeshifting seemed totally in-bounds while designing her, and is a classic trope of old-school 90s anime. The Sentient Darkness was way harder. I probably spent longer designing her than any other character, just because as soon as I gave it any kind of corporeal form, it felt like it was cheating and it no longer represented “darkness”, like a cop out.  Darkness is by definition shapeless, nebulous, and imperceptible, which makes for a poor “character” – too hard to recognize, and too hard to recognize as being from Sucker for Love, specifically.  So, we actually tried a strategy used in Lovecraftian horror; when you can’t show the eldritch thing itself, show the effect it has on other things around it.  And so, the effigy of The Sentient Darkness is an amalgamation of the tear-streaked, petrified bodies of those it has subsumed, mixed in with oxidized statues. This one was actually my wife’s idea when I was struggling to think of anything good.       

Finally, if you could make any horror into a dateable character, who would you choose and why? What personality do you think they’d have?

I’d love to take a swing at The Entity from Dead by Daylight. While most unknowable and incomprehensibly powerful deities are indifferent or ignorant of our existence, The Entity is an actively malicious arachnid horror, and feeds on negative emotions, fattening itself on our misery, fear, and distress. There’s lots of exciting ways this horror could be portrayed personality-wise; a sadistic tormentor that toys with your emotions for its own survival, or perhaps a recluse (no spider pun intended) that fears affection and endearment as much as you fear The Entity. As with Sucker for Love, finding an answer that shows eldritch horrors in a new light while also staying true to the nature of the character is the fun part.