Dan Fornace’s Lovers of Aether arrived on Steam on April 1st, 2019. The romantic dating sim with psychological horror elements managed to arrive on Valve’s platform with nary a peep from the platform holders. The free game is currently available right now over on the Steam store.
The dating sim is a spin-off from Dan Fornace’s Rivals of Aether, which is a Super Smash Bros.-style platform fighting game.
In Lovers of Aether instead of fighting against the other anthropomorphic creatures, you’ll attempt to date them… in high school.
The game started as an April Fool’s joke, but the developers followed through and released it as an actual game, and on April 5th, 2019, they even added Mac support due to the popularity of the project.
The game is set in Aether High and the homecoming dance is fast approaching. You’ll have to mingle with the characters and attempt to win over their affection so you can have a date for the dance, not unlike Monster Prom.
There are various mini-games scattered throughout the visual novel-style game as players will attempt to get acquainted with the furry-enticing cast of characters and indulge in the various school activities leading up to the big homecoming dance.
The first thing that should come to anyone’s mind is “Hey, wait. Didn’t Valve say that romance games set in high school were no longer allowed?” to which I would snidely respond, “You didn’t actually trust that they would apply that rule fairly, did you?”
We’ve seen that Valve has done this before, especially with furry or yaoi style games. Now it’s true that Sakura Tempest, a yaoi visual novel set in high school, was banned. But Dirty Education and Sweet Pool were not, both of which launched after Valve said that games set in “schools” would be highly scrutinized. What that actually meant was that anime-style games set in high schools from indie developers would be highly scrutinized and likely banned.
Heck, Dharker Studios’ all-ages version of My Girlfriend was set in college and was still banned.
What’s sad is that even if the game has no nudity, has no sexual content, is the all-ages version, and it’s set in an academy, college, or school, it’s likely that it will be banned unless it’s a furry game or a yaoi game. Silly as it may sound, this is something that many developers have learned the hard way after ending up on the Waifu Holocaust 2.0 banned game list.
However, it looks like Valve is definitely a lot more lenient toward furry games, most of which have passed by the Steam content curators with nary an issue… so far.
(Thanks for the news tip Consumer)
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