Matchmaker Agency review

Finding love is an important part of all our lives, but in video games it rarely features in a meaningful way. Sure you can romance characters in video games, but usually this boils down to giving someone enough turnips to make them like you in a farming game or saying nice things to a Mass Effect character so you can have fully clothed intercourse. Well I think love is more than turnips and dry humping, and want to help make more happy couples in video games. Matchmaker Agency lets you do just that, with a little light management along the way.

Our main character in Matchmaker Agency comes from a long line of professional Cupids, who spent their childhood with their grandparents helping them with the family business. After a set of tragic circumstances took away this kindly old couple, the agency is left to get dusty and potential partners have nobody to match them. When exploring the old business as an adult you find a letter leaving everything to you, and as long as you’re able to make some payments to the landlord you’ll be the proud owner of the family business.

Matchmaking is no easy task, but fortunately you have your talking cat familiar Charles to help you along the way. There are multiple systems you need to manage to make the most money in Matchmaker Agency, starting with garnering the attention of clients to eventually helping them find love. Every stage of the process will fill up your bank account with cash though, so it’s important to master them all.

To get customers through the door you need to advertise, which involves running some form of campaign in exchange for some hard earned cash. The easiest and cheapest options are adverts you can post in the local newspaper or on the radio, but if you’re really struggling for clients you can spend a week on the streets passing out fliers instead of matching up couples.

Everything you do in Matchmaker Agency takes up a week of your time, and there’s only ever a limited amount of this before your next rent payment is due. I’m not sure why interviewing three clients or setting up a single date takes up a whole seven days to do, but who am I to argue with how the agency works.

Once you’ve got your clients on the books it’s your job to find them a partner, which thanks to your impressive note taking is pretty easy. Each customer has a file with their sexual orientation and a list of likes and dislikes on it, and it’s up to you to find someone who fits the bill. I assumed this wouldn’t always go well, but pretty much everyone I matched loved the person I picked for them regardless of how few words they shared on their files.

This is partially to do with the fact that your magical Cupid powers allow you to join your customers on their dates telepathically and help influence how they behave. This sounds more outlandish than it is, as it basically just means answering very basic questions on dating etiquette. It’s not exactly rocket science to figure out that if someone is talking you should listen to them intently, but apparently the oblivious patrons of the Matchmaker Agency need all the help they can get.

Once you’ve helped find love for your clients and started raking in the money it’s time to invest back into the business, which you can do by buying upgrades that’ll make you a more effective agency. A better waiting room will stop the clients getting bored while they wait (which sort of implies they live there while you find them matches over a period of weeks) but there are also upgrades to help raise your reputation or gain extra money from each client you help. Ultimately though the game is so easy that to pay off all my debts and become a five star rated establishment I didn’t need to buy a single one.

With Matchmaker Agency being such a simple game, it does feel like there needs to be some level of challenge or skill involved in succeeding to be worth playing – and it just doesn’t have any of that. By around week forty out of a hundred I had saved enough money to pay off all the agencies’ debts (the overall goal of the game), had the maximum rating possible, and hadn’t had a single date go wrong. Because of this the next few hours of gameplay were just me going through the motions and waiting for the weeks to go by, and it got old fast.

Matchmaker Agency is an interesting concept for a game, but there just isn’t enough meat on the bones of this one. There are loads of mechanics and upgrades to help you do your job more effectively, but it’s so easy to make money and succeed that there’s never any point to do so. I helped dozens of people find love during my time at the Matchmaker Agency, but sadly I can’t say I fell in love with the game itself.