Love at Elevation
By Steve Wingate
☆☆☆☆☆☆☆ (3/10)
All right. We’ve had too much positivity in this thread. So congrats to Love at Elevation for being my least favorite IF I’ve ever read by a landslide! You know, I’ve never felt skeeved or annoyed when reading in a video game, especially an IF romance. But there’s always a first time for everything! Love at Elevation isn’t offensively bad (or maybe it is?), but it’s definitely not good. Usually, I can say “this isn’t for me,” but this isn’t for anyone. The premise is neat: you move to Colorado in an attempt to find love and happiness. But in reality, it feels like a visual novel that wanted to explore grounded realistic, adult romance, but ended up feeling like a weird blend of wellness retreat propaganda, awkward character writing, and sex-first relationships that never emotionally clicked. I wasn’t offended. I wasn’t charmed. I was just vaguely confused, mildly uncomfortable, and deeply uninvested. This game wants you to care about its characters, but it gives you so few reasons to. I also found the author’s tone to be incredibly jarring in its criticisms of the player.
Pros:
Technically sound writing. Grammar, punctuation, formatting is all clean. The prose itself isn’t terrible, and the pacing is readable. You can tell the author knows how to write; the issue lies more in what they wrote, not how they wrote it.
Beautiful setting. The backdrop of mountain life in a Colorado town is nice. If you squint past the odd tone of the characters, there’s some cozy potential in the idea of small-town community, nature hikes, and fresh starts. It feels like it wants to be relaxing and grounded.
Not a terrible short story concept. The core premise works as a short, one-off novella about a person moving to a beautiful town and navigating romance. It’s why I bought it!
Decent sex scenes. If you’re here for the spice, it’s not bad. They’re not groundbreaking, but they’re competent and decently paced. The sexual writing is one of the only areas that feels consistently confident.
Cons:
The romance options are bizarrely hard to like. I tried. I really did. But every love interest felt more like an awkward person I was being forced to tolerate than someone I actually wanted to get to know. Rae (I picked all female ROs) is described as intense, almost rude, which didn’t quite endear me to her. Kaysha is sweet but seemed very insistent on her work and was late to our dates. The ex is … a clingy ex. The “hippy healer” is a “doctor” of alternative medicine, which is a big turn off for me, sadly. Flawed characters can be great—but these aren’t “flawed and human,” they’re “flawed and grating.” Instead of building chemistry, the game keeps nudging me with a soft “But… don’t you still wanna have sex with them?” No, actually. I actually want to like them first. and instead of growing to love them, I felt like I was dragging my MC through a set of awkward therapy sessions with people I barely liked.
On our first date, the Hippy Healer is fifteen minutes late, with no explanations or apologies. You then catch them checking someone out? And the narrative tells us they slept with that person??? They know you know, and there’s no reason to call them out on that??? Hello??? Dawg, what am I doing. My date just eyefucked someone else and pretended it didn’t happen. Worst first date in IF history.
Forced hippie-town lifestyle. Now listen, I don’t have anything against hippies; I’m just not one. But you will pick between fitness, wellness, or activism. (These three things are also not my interests lol.) You will hike, meditate, do yoga, and pretend to be into holistic medicine. You will love coffee and bookstores. A romance option is even someone studying alternative medicine. The game has no real room for skepticism, sarcasm, or being anything other than a crystal-waving 4/20 bro. If you’re not on board with pseudoscience or new-age vibes, your MC will still act like you are. Roleplaying options are extremely limited; your character is pre-written with one worldview, and it’s aggressively hippy-dippy. Your character will always have a positive attitude alternative medicine. Don’t think meditation is helpful or worthwhile? Too bad, your character will still meditate. It’s one thing to be railroaded; it’s another to be railroaded in a contemporary romance genre with slightly controversial content.
The games take a strange attitude toward romance and sex. In fact, they are two seperate meters. It’s an interesting idea in theory—inclusive for asexual folks, and roleplay a friends-with-benefits scene. But for some reason, you are forced to choose between the two. Your flirting options are “I want to settle down with X” or “I want to jump their bones.” Well, what if I want to do both? It was hard to engage with the story when I didn’t care about the “romance” side of the romance. Sex and love don’t have to be synonymous—but they should at least feel related. What if the more I love someone, the more I want to have sex with them? This mechanic was too binary.
Just some really bizarre tone in dialogue and character reactions. This writing honestly made me feel judged and insulted. For example: “Kayshe accepts your decision. As you make dinner and talk, she keeps looking at you as if she thinks she’ll be able to talk you into sex later on. You’re not keen on that happening—or on Kaysha thinking it, either. It’s making you uncomfortable, in fact, because you don’t feel it’s helping to rebuild the trust that you need to rebuild something after your misunderstanding. Maybe that will come later tonight, you hope. And if it doesn’t, then maybe prospects for you and Kaysha aren’t as rosy as you’d like to think.” I don’t love the idea of an RO “talking you into sex later on,” but that’s realistic to some people, I get that. But on a date with her, another RO comes to chat. I was perfectly polite and accepted her number as a friend. However, the narration says: “It says something about you that you let yourself be chatted up while on a date.” I did what now?
Some other things that irked me below the cut (warning: long!):
She circles around you, observing the way you hold yourself. “I used to work in the financial sector,” she finally says. “I analyzed companies to see if they were worth taking over, wrote hundred-page reports that people only read the first two pages of. Then one day my body said no. Everything stopped. I didn’t have a body anymore, all I had was a mouth to talk with and hands to write with. I’d let my whole body become a machine to feed the part that made my living . . . . I gave it all up. I found qigong medicine, working directly with people’s energies, and I didn’t look back." Mom, come pick me up, I’m scared.
“It seems like you’re only interested in sex,” she says. Huh? That really comes out of nowhere. “Is that such a bad thing?”
“The only part is, yeah. It’s hard to have a conversation with somebody like that, because sooner or later every conversation comes back to sex. Sometimes it’s just the look in your eye. I’m trying to have a real conversation and you shoot the bedroom eyes at me.” She looks at you condescendingly, as if you’re a weak person that she’s trying to lift up into self-confidence.”
Oh, fuck off lol. Did I get slut shamed in a GAME? Some lines are so weirdly condescending.
All romances follow the same structure. No matter who you choose, your dates hit the same beats: same activities, same friend drama, same emotional arc. There’s a recycled feeling to it all. It felt like relationship speedrunning, and not in a fun way. No matter who you’re with, the story plays out the same. The “rival” who tries to sabotage your relationship shows up regardless, with identical dialogue. Everyone’s problems start feeling interchangeable. It makes your choices feel cosmetic.
The Ex plotline was also … underwhelming. I had no idea why we broke up, why I would even get back together with them, and our first in-game interaction is them being clingy and aggressive. Yay for toxic exces, I guess. This game is weird, man.