Going into this game I was quite skeptical about the whole idea that one could play a game that is mainly focused around finding you a suitable partner. Steam has been drowning in similar titles, the most notable being Hatoful Boyfriend, where you’re tragically attracted to a New York pigeon. With that said, it seemed that Xbox One was kind of immune from such experiences, until today.
Kitty Powers—whom I had no idea existed so I had to do some research into her character—decided that she wanted to make a game centered around the notion of setting people up. In that momentary lapse of judgment, Kitty Powers’ Matchmaker was born. Although the game seems to have been relatively successful on other platforms—mainly mobile—it was ripe to be ported to console.
The game starts with you setting up your character, who forms a new organization in the dating industry. You’re helped along by Kitty Powers, who’s voice reminds me of the Nanny in Drawn Together with her British accent. Once you’ve set up your character and your personality—something you’ll never use again—you’re transported to your new headquarters. The building, a small pink hovel, grows as you progress through the game and increase your skill at matching strangers up.
The game segregates the population between Geeky, Edgy, Sporty and Hipster. Each one of these groups has requirements, and each comes with their own difficulty level, with Hipster being the most difficult obviously. When you start, you choose one of these groups and off you go. At your headquarters, you start to see a steady stream of customers looking for love.
When you decide to take on one of these hopelessly destitute persons, you conduct an interview, where you find out everything they like, what they’re attracted to and their sexual preferences. Once you have this information in tow, you have to choose a suitable partner from a little black book, matching information. The game also allows you to modify your customers using in-game stylists and such, to make them more compatible with a future lover.
Once you have found the perfect mate, you send them off to a restaurant. The game however feels like it has to make everything into a puzzle, which makes it frustrating especially when you have to set your customer up on multiple dates. For instance, the restaurant picker isn’t straightforward as it hides the names from you and then shuffles them around expecting you to remember which one you actually want, on top of the things you have to remember about all their previous dates.
The torture doesn’t end there. During the date, you have to hang around whispering in their ear like some far-flung nightmare world you would see in Black Mirror. As they hang out, you have to remember trivial aspects like which dessert they want, what food they would prefer, and whenever the chef pops out of the kitchen, whatever random words flash across the screen.
Kitty Powers’ Matchmaker isn’t easy. Each date comes with pitfalls. Sometimes you get random bowel movements and you have to win a game of “higher-lower” to prevent a massive “fart” from ruining the date. I mean, seriously? Is that really necessary? The game also makes your answers into questions, where you have to tell the truth or lie to impress your future mate. In each case, when you do choose to lie—usually the positive response—you have to spin a “wheel of misfortune”, which randomizes the results of your said lie. This is actually an interesting mechanic.
Once the date concludes, you set off and decide then and there if they want to date each other, which is kind of funny and sad, since it never works out that way in the real world. But I digress.
Kitty Powers’ Matchmaker is very well built, and from my experience with the game, I haven’t found any defects or bugs that caused an interruption in gameplay, other than the urge to go blow something up due to the crude humor. I understand that the game is mainly aimed at people who want something casual to play while they’re on a bus or when they’re pretending to work. However, what I don’t get is why the publishers found it necessary to port this title to Xbox One. We have seen many indie titles come from PC and mobile to Xbox One, most recently Fallout Shelter to varied success, but this game boggles my mind as to who told these poor developers that it would see success on the console. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there are plenty of people out there who like buying games that feel like gag gifts. I personally doubt that but then again I haven’t conducted surveys.
Kitty Powers’ Matchmaker isn’t a bad game in any sense, but with Xbox One flush with games that mainly focus around murder, and pretty soon will render that murder in 4K with Project Scorpio, I find it hard to recommend this game to any of those people. If they wanted a fun little mobile game to play on the train to work, I would recommend it in a heartbeat. However, that’s not what people want from consoles in my opinion.
This is what I find puzzling about the gaming industry in general: titles that would never have made it to consoles before suddenly get pushed to it to fill up their stores, and in the end become background noise to the bigger games. If these games were free, maybe I could understand, but more often than not they charge for the experience and end up causing these developers to ditch platforms altogether…based on nothing more than their previous misguided attempts at easy money.
Summary
Kitty Powers’ Matchmaker is a fun little mobile game centered around finding love for desperate hipsters that has managed to find itself on consoles. Like a child in an adult conversation, it feels out of place. The game is well designed and colorful, but it can’t be given to kids due to the overarching innuendos splashed across the world. With that in mind, the game seems to be a strange entry on Xbox One, with this reviewer finding it hard to place and to justify it being on the console in the first place. As a mobile game I would recommend it instantly because playing it in small doses on the go is fun, but I think console gamers demand deeper experiences.
Dreyer was a regular ICXM contributor between 2016–2017, publishing 139 articles across opinion pieces, game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative. They post on X as @dreyer_smit.