PC Review: Love and Order

Otome games may be wildly popular in Japan, but they’ve yet to catch on in other parts of the world, which definitely makes Winter Wolves‘ newest game, Love and Order, a unique game right off the bat. The way it was advertised as a “dating/office sim” game with a storyline steeped in the elements of mystery only served to intrigue me more.

In Love and Order, you take on the role of Dana Larose, the new secretary hired for a small law firm in Montreal. Although the firm is run by Crown Attorney Williams, the main characters you’ll be interacting with as Dana are your boss, Ross Kim, 3rd year law school student Jonathan Nyugen, and assistant crown attorneys Pierre Martin and Dorothy McCoy. You can pursue a relationship with all of listed characters (yes, even Dorothy, which I think is awesome), with the exception of Williams–I think he’s too old for Dana anyway.

But before you get to that level of intimacy, you, as Dana, will have to impress not only the person you want to ask out (they will refuse unless their relationship bar, pictured in the top right-hand corner, is sufficiently filled), but everybody in the firm. Aka you have to do your job as secretary well, which apparently entails running around taking assignments from everyone and completing them before their due date. And if you don’t succeed? Just like in real life, you’ll be fired from your job! (And unlike in real life, you’ll also be greeted by a big “Game Over.”) That’s a good life lesson right there. It’s also a large bulk of the Love and Order, so if you don’t like management games, you might want to pass on this one.

Navigating the game is pretty simple, seeing as there isn’t an overwhelming amount of locations. The locations in the law firm (the two rows on the right-hand side) are where you obtain tasks to complete from the four characters and then subsequently complete them. Every weekday, you have to make choices about what to do during morning, lunch, early afternoon, late afternoon, and evening. Working hours exclude lunch and evening. When you complete a task during working hours, Dana will gain 3% stress. Completing a task outside of working hours will get Dana an additional 10% stress, for a total of 13% stress. Again, like in real life, stress is bad. You don’t want it–the percent stress Dana is at determines how likely she is to fail at the task you want her to complete. Since “stress failure” tacks on an additional 13% stress, it gets really hard to get things done when it piles up.

The other locations in the game are places where you can reduce your stress, for varying prices. During lunch time, three lunch locations also open up as options to help you relieve stress. There’s also a nifty watch you can buy in the Shopping Mall that reduces how much stress you gain per action. Definitely a nice investment if you manage to save up $200.

In addition to juggling an extremely challenging job, there is also a storyline, concerning a mysteriously dropped case, that you can move through at your own pace. I enjoyed the addition, but I felt like it was a little anticlimatic overall. I don’t want to give away the mystery, but I felt as though the story was a little one-dimensional–the only reason it the mystery took a long time to get to the bottom to was due to various delays and uncooperative people. A few red herrings here and there would have been nice.

And of course, we finally get to one of the main selling points of the game: making relationships. I like the fact that the ending changes depending on who you form a bond with (taking the website’s word on that, as I only finished one playthrough so far); it gives the game more replayability. However, I was a little disappointed with how the dating worked in the game–once you asked someone out and they accepted, there isn’t an option to break things off with them should you change your mind. This is somewhat unrealistic. My other complaint is that dating doesn’t really get you anywhere. Your significant other will occasionally invite you to have dinner with them on a designated evening, but the dates are neither interesting, nor interactive. I’ve gotten two dates that featured the same, exact narration that you basically click through, which isn’t particularly fun to do (and a waste of an evening). There are some dates where you can choose how you want to respond to your significant other’s question/comment, but what you click doesn’t affect anything in the game, which makes the whole dating thing seem rather irrelevant.

While we’re on the negative things, there are also some bugs in the game. They weren’t a big problem, but there was this one time I had the “Stress Failure” pop-up stuck in the middle of my screen (pictured below), which was incredibly distracting. I had to get another stress failure to get rid of it and then restart the game.

However, despite all my negative comments, I actually quite enjoyed the game. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting, since I thought the dating aspect would factor more into gameplay, but Love and Order definitely makes for a fun, addicting way to pass the time. With some updates, it could be a stellar addition to your computer! I’d give the game a 7.5.

You can download the demo and/or purchase Love and Order here.