Print I Love You Review

Print I Love You is a small game played more for the experience than the gameplay. The premise is that someone who bought a used laptop found some code for a game created by the previous owner and decided to share the game with the world. The game is a love letter to one Alice Print, a collection of three mini games that represent the programmer’s desire to hold hands with Alice, take her clothes shopping, and go on a dinner date.

The games are quite simple and easy to play/beat. The holding hands game pins an arm that you can spin on the axis around the screen. Characters will float across the screen and the goal is to use the hand to touch the little Alice’s crossing the screen while avoiding the alien monsters that represent romantic rivals.

The shopping game presents you with a dress pattern and color, and your goal is the to pick the dress to match from a collection of dresses that are scrolled onto the screen.

The dinner date game is a very basic rhythm game in which hearts scroll across the screen. When the two moving hearts converge on a static heart in the middle of the screen you need to hit a button.

Reading the text that sets-up the context and the instructions for each game, along with beating each mini game in turn, will take you all of fifteen minutes at the most. When you do, you’ll find that you unlocked the bad ending. To discover the alternate good ending, you’ll need to play the game again.

Even though you’ll start a new game the second time through, the game will be aware that you’ve played before and things will take a darker turn. I don’t want to spoil things here, but perhaps the game’s programmer’s emotions veered more towards obsession than an innocent crush.

Playing through the game’s endings and collecting all of its achievements will take closer to half an hour than a full hour. The game is less than $2 on Steam, so the entertainment cost per hour is not actually that bad. The question is, though, are you willing to play through the same three tedious mini games multiple times to reveal the branches in the story of what is essentially a visual novella? There was some potential here to explore the themes of love and obsession in more depth with a longer playtime and less reliance on the mini games, but what you’re left with is a diversion that’s just sort of interesting story-wise and a bit tedious gameplay-wise.