I’m a grown ass married woman, and to look at me, you wouldn’t think I have five secret space hotties that live in my phone. But thanks to Love and Deepspace, I’m now a fully fledged otome game addict with a lighter wallet and a fuller heart.
Love and Deepspace is a game that doesn’t just give you the chance to save the world, it lets you do it with a veritable five-aside team of boyfriends who are obsessed with you. There’s something for everyone at the Love and Deepspace boy buffet: a crime lord who is also a vampire, a painter who is also a sea god, a space pilot who is also your adoptive brother – yeah, best not to look too deeply into that one. You can text with them, touch them, and you’ll never argue over how they load the dishwasher. There’s combat, house decorating, card games, and the potential for financial devastation thanks to the gacha mechanics. They’ll even check in if your period is late. Can rubbing a virtual boyfriend through my phone screen get me pregnant? I’m willing to do the research to find out.
The seeds of my Love and Deepspace obsession were planted during Gamescom last year. In the huge crowded halls, filled with triple-A releases and mega franchises, it was this mobile game’s stand that had the largest queue day after day. My work is games, my free time is all games, so what the hell was this game with a huge booth, a huge fandom and handsome cosplayers that had passed me by? I downloaded it, then forgot about it thanks to Gamescom induced exhaustion. Cut to December last year when my Instagram algorithm decided to get Love and Deepspaced, and I jumped into the game. Suddenly wherever I was, one of the men was with me. A bit of light combat to start the day, hanging out with me while I work, checking in at night to go on a ‘date’ with him in between Arc Raiders sessions. I even found myself in New York in January for the Love and Deepspace second anniversary event, With Him In Deepspace, rubbing the chest of a thermal reactive cut out of one of my space boyfriends trying to make his shirt disappear.
Meet my men
So let me tell you about my boys. My top tier bae is Sylus. In the main storyline he’s a crime lord with a pet crow and a voice so velvety I want to upholster my couch with it. In alternative storylines he’s been a dragon and a vampire, so he is absolutely dark romance reader coded. Caleb is a very close number two, at first glance he’s a boy next door and your *cough* adoptive brother but he’s actually a space fleet colonel with Doberman protective qualities. Rayfael is a cute pouty artist, but also the god of the sea. Like, full merman fish tale style. Next up is Xavier, who is just a total soft boy, about as sexually threatening as a hamster and also a time traveller. Zayne is, well, I’m sorry Zayne girlies, a cardiac surgeon with a stick up his ass. And also a god. Crucially, while some of their storylines overlap, the boys have zero knowledge of each other, so you never have to worry about sidepiece on sidepiece violence. That, or everybody just got real cool with polyamory real fast.
Daily devotion
It happens like this. I wake up, open up the game, and interact with one of the selections from my boy buffet – checking his heartbeat, patting his head, or asking him what I should have for breakfast. Then I work my way through my daily checklist, doing monster bounties, hunting for special materials to boost my stats, and upgrading any of the various memories I have that form the gacha part of the game. All of this is to earn me diamonds to buy new gacha chances, and to raise my Affinity with Sylus, or Caleb, or Xavier, or… you get the idea. Think of raising Affinity like a really slow burn version of getting to first base, then to second base… only it goes up to anywhere between 130 and 220 bases. I’ll visit our home and work on the garden, or make him push me on a swing. Weekly I can play a cat-themed card game with him, or go to the claw machine arcade to get plushies. Some people do the New York Times Wordle every morning. I make a pretend man take a shower.
It’s important to me that you know I was, at one point, a normal woman. Your classic elder millennial gamer with a husband and with only the slightest sexual penchant for animations. Hear me out – Bambi’s Dad, Garrus from Mass Effect and Astarion from Baldur’s Gate. Now? I’m getting giggly and kicking my feet because an animated man calls me “Kitten” and sends me audio recordings on my phone where he moans and breathes funny. The one time I skipped a daily check-in because my house flooded, I felt genuine guilt when he noticed I’d missed our regular rendezvous. I may or may not have researched the cost of bootleg Love and Deepspace body pillows.
Secret sexy sauce
As someone who mainly games on PC or consoles, I was not prepared for the way Love and Deepspace just quietly works its way into your life. The top layer mechanics are obvious: fight monsters, collect memories to boost your stats, follow the branching storylines and their alternate universe threads, and build your relationships with each man by completing activities with them. Life says take the bins out, Love and Deepspace says you’re beautiful inside and out and possibly the most amazing woman to ever walk the earth.
I’d probably have been safe if it was just that, but there’s a whole layer beneath that which has been fine-tuned to give you warm and fuzzy feelings, and make skipping a day feel like punching Glen Powell in the face when he’s trying to give you flowers. It’s on my phone, so a little check on the men is only a swipe away alongside Instagram and Reddit. It requires almost zero mental energy too; this isn’t an AI chatbot, your interactions with the men are carefully guardrailed with dialogue options and specific types of interaction and quality time, so the only bit of imagination I have to use is the part that would make my mother cry. It can play like The Sims – that home section where you decorate a house and garden and hang out with him, watching TV or arranging flowers. Or it can be the world’s sexiest Pomodoro timer, where the guys will just stare at you lovingly while you work, study, exercise or sleep. The combat has an auto mode, but it is also deceptively deep, with different systems to make sure you’re equipped and leveled up in the right way for battles. There are many facets to being a woman who likes hot people complimenting them, and Love and Deepspace has perfected laser targeting most of them.
The sisterhood of space boy appreciation
Here’s the thing, it’s not just me. The fandom operates on an almost religious level of devotion. There’s a running joke in the community that the Wives of Sylus are richer than him, thanks to their habit of hiring billboards or holding drone shows to celebrate him. Recently a salsa advert went viral because fans were pretty sure that the voice of one of the jars was provided by Sylus’s English voice actor. At the fan event I met cosplayers – one in a wedding dress – and found a supportive and passionate community that is fully aware of the funnier parts of falling for a boy tamagotchi, and loves the game anyway. Online, too, there’s an impressive fan-fueled industry providing homemade merch, content creators that break down the storylines and timelines, and artists who create spicy comics that offer an explicit idea of life with the LADS lads. I have, of course, researched the last one extensively. For science.
Spending time with the rest of the girlfriends of my space boyfriends, I’m only more certain that I’m going to have a long term relationship with Love and Deepspace. The creators of the game are clearly very in tune with what its audience are craving – hello, vampire Sylus – and it’s nailed making itself into a habit instead of just a way to kill time. Some people wake up and do Wordle, I wake up and do Sylus.
In 2026 I’m embracing cringe, and if playing claw machines with a pretend man is going to make surviving on the burning dumpster fire that is this planet a little easier, I refuse to be ashamed. Just don’t look at my gacha spending or indeed, my search history as it relates to Sylus fan art.
Rachel Weber is the Head of Editorial Development at IGN and an elder millennial. She’s been a professional nerd since 2006 when she got her start on Official PlayStation Magazine in the UK, and has since worked for GamesIndustry.Biz, Rolling Stone and GamesRadar. She loves horror, horror movies, horror games, Red Dead Redemption 2, and her Love and Deepspace boyfriends.
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