SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim demo promises dark, sexy and surreal experience where your decisions can be fatal 

Japanese indie developer SAFE HAVN STUDIO has just released a demo for SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim as part of Steam Next Fest. The demo teases at a dark yet quirky story-driven experience tinged with black humor, where no-one is quite what they seem, and your choices can have devastating consequences. Playable in Japanese, English and Chinese, the full game is coming out sometime this year. 

This surreal game casts you as Rin, an amnesiac who has mysteriously shrunk and is taken in by a girl called Saeko. Merely the size of her thumb, you are the latest plaything to be added to her desk drawer. But be warned, Saeko has some interesting hobbies. 

Although the game describes itself as a dating sim, it also promises a dark and sometimes brutal tale of survival (the game has an opening warning for depictions of sexual content and cruelty). With a distinctive visual style employing black backgrounds and animated pixel art, plus its unusual premise, it’s not hard to see why a Japanese tweet announcing the game last year has since been shared 9700 times and bookmarked by over 5400 people. 

The demo gives a taste of how the game will play out. It works like a cross between a visual novel and a point-and-click adventure game- allowing you to talk to people or interact with objects by clicking on them. As the “supervisor” of the eccentric cast of characters trapped in the drawer, and you can make decisions as to how you treat them- do you give one person some food or do you deny their request? These choices and how you converse with them can influence their fate- sometimes in brutal and unforeseen ways. To add pressure, Saeko has chosen you as her conversation partner and how you respond to her statements at night can also have surprising consequences. As a side note, the demo states that in the final game, the BGM will likely be displayed on the iPod in Saeko’s desk. 

The demo alone threw some intriguing characters, bizarre situations and plenty of sudden and unexpected happenings my way, so the final game is likely to have plenty to keep fans of unconventional story-driven games happy. 

The developer SAFE HAVN STUDIO is a Japan-based team made up of three members who are self-confessed fans of visual novel games and eroge. Incidentally, they are named after a song from VA-11 Hall-A. SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim is apparently their first release and promises to be “The deepest journey into a developer’s proclivities in indie game history.” So far, it seems to be shaping up well. 

Considering the recent “big girl boom” on X, in which a mixture of very tall and giant female characters got much love (including Resident Evil’s Lady Dimitrescu, and Hidetaka Miyazaki’s characters in FromSoftware games), SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim may have come along at just the right time. 

SAEKO: Giantess Dating Sim is scheduled to be released for PC (Steam) in 2024. A playable demo was released on June 10 in Japanese, English and Chinese.