Adopt a dog and date other dog owners in a game that crosses visual novel romance with a petcare sim.
Best Friend Forever
Developer: Starcolt
Price: $20
Platforms: PC, Switch (reviewed)
MonsterVine was provided with a Switch code for review.
Best Friend Forever puts you in the shoes of a character who has just moved to Rainbow Bay, the most dog-friendly city in the world. After choosing a few limited customization options, you move into your new apartment, sign up on Woofr to meet other dog-owning singles, and adopt a puppy from one of four available options. It’s a simple slice-of-life story about starting a new life for yourself while learning how to raise a dog.
From the moment you adopt your dog, he or she will appear in the corner of the screen alongside the dialogue box whenever you’re in the game’s visual novel mode. You can pet the dog at any moment, but that’s not the only way this factors into gameplay. “Dog events” occur independently of the dialogue, so you’ll need to pay attention to react to your dog’s behavior–whether that means comforting her because she’s scared, pulling her away from a character she’s tugging at, or cleaning up poop. Succeeding at a dog event boosts your dog’s stats, while failing lowers them. This is a clever way to create the sense of having a dog with you, although it does create the odd side effect that you get more chances at stat boosts if you go through the scenes slowly.
At the start of each week, you have 5 motivation points that you can spend on activities such as meeting with one of the game’s love interests or enjoying “pawsonal time” with your dog, although sadly these dog interactions come in the form of a paragraph rather than a visual novel scene. Once you’ve spent a little time with a character, you have the option of going on a date with them. You can go through the entire game without dating, but since only three “pawsonal time” events are available each week, you still have to interact with the other characters. Sometimes the dialogue in these scenes feels forced, like it’s trying a bit too hard to be quirky or imitate the way people talk online, but the way the characters talk to and about their dogs is on-point. It’s clear Best Friend Forever was made by people who love dogs and wanted their characters to sound like genuine dog owners.
The primary characters are the six possible romantic interests, three men and three women. Each has three dates available, during which their stories play out. Like the main story, these are smaller, slice-of-life events that range from tracking down clues written by a mystery lover to find out where he is, to helping a city planner gather signatures for her petition to build new apartment buildings. The level of romance and physical intimacy varies greatly based on the character, and it feels as though the writers couldn’t decide on how much control they wanted the player to have. One character’s route let me choose whether or not to get physical on the first and second date, another let me choose on the first date but then went straight to a fade-to-black sex scene on the second, and some never had any such choices at all. Maybe it was meant to show the differences between the love interests, but it ended up feeling weirdly inconsistent.
Once you’ve spent your motivation points, you need to plan out the week’s training activities for your dog. These boost your dog’s primary stats: manners, social, trust, smarts, and fitness. At certain points during the game, you’ll be assessed based on your dog’s progress and told which stats need more attention. However, stats don’t seem to actually affect the gameplay, and even if you do badly enough to fail, it only changes a bit of dialogue in the ending.
After that, you’ll attend to your dog’s other needs: satiation, hydration, mood, hygiene, and energy. These are handled through short mini-games like holding a bowl of food in front of your dog’s face. These interactions are adorable, but keeping the meters maxed is almost too easy. Even the one time I experimented and managed to completely drain the energy meter, it only took until the next week to have everything maxed again. Since there’s no requirement to do any particular activity, I quickly found a few favored ones I used most often. It felt less like balancing stats or taking care of a dog and more like picking options because the game wouldn’t let me move on until I did.
And that’s the biggest problem with Best Friend Forever: everything ends up feeling tedious. A single playthrough should take an hour or two, so there’s a decent amount of playtime if you want to see all the character routes, but since the main story stays the same, you’ll need to sit through the same scenes every time. Picking training activities becomes repetitive since the outcome is only a short description and the stakes are so low, and cuteness alone isn’t enough to carry the petcare part. Only the date scenes and endings change from playthrough to playthrough, and there’s no way to skip content you’ve already seen.
I also ran into a frustrating number of bugs. These ranged from minor annoyances (no emails appearing in the inbox despite an ever-present notification that I had messages, an ending that kept replaying instead of going to the credits) to funny glitches (a character leaving to give me and my love interest alone time only for his sprite to remain stubbornly on the screen) to major problems (a scene getting stuck in an eternal loop if I asked about the character’s family situation, characters’ third dates failing to appear even after I locked in the romance option), and all together they ended up souring the experience. Here’s hoping a patch smooths out these issues.
The Final Word
Best Friend Forever is cute, and you’re bound to get some smiles out of it if you’re a pet-lover. Unfortunately, the rest of it ends up feeling half-hearted. It doesn’t have a great deal of depth as a simulation game, and the visual novel aspect isn’t compelling either. The dogs are the highlight, though, and at least it really does come across as a celebration of dogs and dog owners.
MonsterVine Rating: 3 out of 5 – Average
