It’s one of the most famous clichés in game reviews: saying that a game is really only mediocre, except for the real fans. Yet this cliché is very applicable to the game Too Hot To Handle that you can play for free if you have a Netflix account.
Too Hot To Handle
Too Hot To Handle is a dating sim modeled entirely on Netflix’s famous dating show. Here all beautiful and often quite renovated singles come together to date each other without kissing and sex. There is a kind of Google Nest Mini that monitors whether everyone adheres to its rules. Still kissing or having sex, then money goes out of the prize pool of more than a ton.
That’s silly, because that’s not necessarily your money: it’s the group’s money. In short: if you can’t hold back after watching beautiful people in bikinis all day, then the whole group will suffer. You don’t have to be a behavioral expert to understand that things always go wrong, of course. There are always those people who ignore everything, but there are also people who end up experiencing enormous “growth” and building a “meaningful bond” with the person they really want to do.
From TV to game
It’s a special show and we were curious how something like this would translate into a game. After all, that physical aspect cannot really be captured in a game. Yet the maker knows how to do this quite well. You are so involved in the setting and what someone is doing that, especially if you know the series well, you are pretty well carried away. There are also so many benchmarks that are so well known from the series: the night that is always mysterious and of which the robot Lana then says every morning who has crossed the line. But the diary moments are also mapped out quite funny. The dialogue also reads very naturally.
What also helps is that the game is semi-diverse. Your character is bisexual anyway, you can give the character vitiligo and there are different ethnicities to choose from. It is still about people with big eyes, big lips and otherwise a fairly thin waist, which is a bit of a shame. It’s all fairly interchangeable: in some cases we even forgot who was who all the time, because several characters were too similar. So yes in itself the game certainly scores points for diversity, but at the same time it could have been a bit more extensive.
Netflix Games
All sounds good, but there is also a downside and that is actually something that mainly has to do with the genre. Dating sims are a lot of reading and if you have little patience or a short attention span, you will probably have a hard time playing this game. are you like that? Then make sure you stick to one chapter at a time (despite the fact that the game makers know how to make cliffhangers quite well). If you really don’t like it, then stop playing. This, like the Netflix series itself, is definitely a game that you just have to love.
There is – not entirely surprisingly – little depth. It is mainly a lot of flirting and you always have three choices, whereby it is also clear quite quickly which group belongs to which group: flirty in a sexy way, flirty in a serious way and a bit neutral. Again, the conversations are quite nicely written, but you really have to go through a lot of text. So here it comes, the cliché: do you really like dating sims and this TV show too? Then you will also like this game. If not, you better ignore this Netflix Game. Saves you getting caught by Lana again.
Laura Jenny
When she’s not tapping, she’s traveling around the wonderful world of entertainment or some cool place in the real world. Mario is the man of her life,…
