Love Is All Around

Love Is All Around is a full-motion-video interactive romance from Chinese studio intiny, filmed with real actors on real sets rather than rendered in an engine. You take the role of Gu Yi, a man working off significant debt, and the camera stays in first person for the duration — which is most of the point. Every scene plays out as live-action footage shot from your character's eyes, and your only inputs are decisions in branching dialogue and the occasional environmental clue.

The core question the game keeps asking is what you want to optimise for. There are six romanceable women — an ingenue, an intellectual, a free-spirited gamine, a wealthy and somewhat self-destructive heiress, a glamorous goddess and a domineering CEO — each with their own personality, conflicts and routes, and on top of that a parallel pressure to focus on paying off your debts. Players who chase money lose romance arcs; players who follow their feelings tend to bleed cash.

More than a hundred story branches lead to twelve distinct endings, with additional hidden routes and bonus scenes for thorough players. Clues to side stories often sit in the scenery — props, glances, small details in the footage — and the game encourages a second pass that pays attention to what you missed. The studio's framing is openly self-deprecating: a team of homebound nerds who decided to film their own dream of dating life and ended up shipping it.