Having now played a few FMV dating games in this same vein, it may surprise you, but I was actually looking forward to seeing how this would turn out. Mind you, neither of those titles were likely to garner mainstream appeal or win any Academy Awards, but for being pretty dialed into a very narrow focus I found them to be pretty honest and interesting. Speed Dates is absolutely working in that same general direction, but a few key things may make it a poorer choice, depending on what you’re looking for.

The idea here is that you’re playing the part of what appears to be a 20-something man, out on the town, and roped into participating in some speed dating. Given the pretty substantial number of similarly-aged women you’ll be chatting it up with, coming in at a pretty full night of 18, you’ve got your work cut out for you! As you might expect with this many people to interact with, there’s a very good chance that a fair portion of them won’t likely click with you, which you’ll be able to indicate to some degree with your responses to what they have to say, or you can simply choose to politely move things along even if your heart may not be in it.

For me there were some challenges to this game that I didn’t bump into quite as much as with the others I’ve played. The first is that since the dialogue is apparently in Turkish, that means I had to read the subtitles to keep up. That in itself isn’t so much the issue as the sheer pace that some of the dialogue goes whipping by at. Given that a big part of this experience isn’t just hearing what people say, but also reading their body language and facial expressions as they say it, it made reading what they had to say while trying to give them “eye contact” to take in the whole performance a challenge. Throw in some frustration that my character would answer some questions without giving me a chance to provide my input and there were times when the interactivity angle fell apart. Finally, while it may come down to personal tastes, with so many people I also found a few of them to be outright annoying, virtually looking at my watch and hoping to hear the bell ring so I could move on. I respect what they’ve made here, and some of the stories you’ll find emerging through the dialogue can be fun, but it was also harder to enjoy than some of the competition.