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The Weirdest Dating Simulators I could find

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A viral animator turns her lens on the internet’s strangest dating sims.

Jaiden Dittfach, the creator behind the YouTube channel Jaiden Animations, dropped a new storytime video on November 14, 2021, and it wasn’t about school, DoorDash disasters, or her dog Butters. Titled “Dating things I shouldn’t” (and cross-listed as “The Weirdest Dating Simulators I could find”), the video sends Jaiden hunting through the visual novel genre for the most unhinged romance options the internet has to offer. What she finds is a genre that has quietly wandered miles past the standard high-school-crush formula.

• Jaiden Animations uploaded “Dating things I shouldn’t” on November 14, 2021, framing it as a survey of dating simulators that abandon traditional human love interests.
• The video walks through titles including Speed Dating for Ghosts, along with games built around anthropomorphic animals and, in some cases, everyday objects rather than people.
• Jaiden’s commentary leans on her signature animated reactions to absurd dialogue trees and character designs rather than a straight let’s-play format.

The Genre That Won’t Stay Normal

Dating simulators started as a fairly narrow lane in Japanese gaming — pick a character, raise a stat, get a confession scene. That formula has splintered wildly over the past decade, and Jaiden’s video treats that splintering as the whole point. Rather than mock the genre from a distance, she plays through several of these games on camera and reacts in real time to choices no visual novel designer would have proposed twenty years ago.

The throughline of the video is escalation. She starts with games that are merely offbeat and works toward ones that are outright surreal, using her own bewildered reactions as the comedic engine rather than narration alone.

Ghosts, Birds, and Horses With Human Faces

Speed Dating for Ghosts anchors the spookier end of Jaiden’s playthrough, dropping her into a series of rapid-fire encounters with spectral suitors instead of the living. Elsewhere in the video, the anthropomorphic-animal wing of the genre gets its due: Hatoful Boyfriend, in which the player attends a high school as the lone human among a cast of romanceable birds, has built a cult reputation over more than 20 possible endings depending on the choices made. Purrfect Date takes a similar animal-forward approach, casting the player as a researcher dating a cast of cats on a mysterious island while puzzle-solving segments uncover the island’s darker backstory.

Then there’s the outright novelty-object territory. Mr. Massagy reframes each “love interest” as a different massage or relaxation technique, and My Horse Prince asks players to fall for a horse with a human face in a Japan-set visual novel that leans fully into its own absurdity. Jaiden’s reactions to both play like a person watching a genre dare itself to go further.

Hatoful Boyfriend alone offers more than 20 different endings — for a game where every potential boyfriend is a pigeon.

The Sincere Outlier

Dream Daddy gets folded into the lineup as the closest thing to a grounded counterpoint. The game puts the player in the role of a single father who moves to a new town with his daughter and ends up pursuing romance with a cast of other single dads. Compared to speed-dating ghosts or falling for a horse, it plays almost conventional — which is part of why Jaiden uses it as a breather between the genre’s stranger extremes.

Commentary Built on Reaction, Not Ridicule

What separates Jaiden’s take from a simple “look at this weird game” listicle is the delivery. Her animated segments translate real-time facial reactions and asides into full bits, turning a screen recording of dialogue choices into a comedic set piece. It’s the same format that’s carried her channel through years of storytimes, applied here to a subject that hands her material without much embellishment needed — the games themselves are already writing the punchlines.

Jaiden’s channel has built its audience on exactly this kind of format — take something ordinary or strange, animate her real reaction to it, and let the absurdity do the work, the same instinct that’s turned gaming-focused YouTube breakdowns and marathon stunts like a 100-hour Minecraft Hardcore run into some of the platform’s most watched formats. With “Dating things I shouldn’t” barely a day old as of this writing, the real number to watch is how fast it climbs toward the view counts her other storytimes have racked up — and whether she comes back for a sequel once the internet inevitably points her toward an even weirder dating sim she missed.