Romance is a staple in many video game genres, and has been for decades. From humble life sims to grand RPGs, we all want to find a little love along the way. And when you play a game filled with so many deep and interesting characters, it can be hard to find the one you (or at least your character) truly wants to spend their life with.
But what if that didn’t have to be the case? Love doesn’t always have to be monogamous. In these games, love can be found in so many different forms, whether that’s just allowing your character to romance multiple people at once, or even letting multiple characters all be in one big relationship with each other. Pass the love around some.
Fextralife Wiki
While far from being the first aspect anyone would think of in a Bethesda game, Fallout 4 does in fact come with quite a few romance options. There are some short-term relationships you can pursue with other characters, but your companions are the only ones you can have a deep relationship with. And as it turns out, you can love them all at once.
In typical Bethesda fashion, you are very rarely locked out of achieving everything the game has to offer in a single run, and romance is the same this time around. You have eight different companions you may romance, from the ever patriotic Preston Garvey to the daring journalist Piper. There’s no acknowledgement of each of you loving each other, but no one has any problems with it, either.
Potionomics is a game all about making potions, and selling them for the highest price you possibly can. And that involves a lot of haggling, with both customers and competitors. While much of that comes in the form of a deck builder, you also have plenty of options to pursue a relationship that is, well, rather anti-competitive.
While they do say you should never mix business and pleasure, that is the core of Potionomics. In fact, so beloved were the romances in the game that a later update removed the restriction on just having one in a playthrough. So romance your competitors to your heart’s content. There’s more than enough love and profit to go around.
In Pathfinder: Kingmaker, you will find a game that isvery true to its TTRPG roots, which can feel at times overly cruel. But what the game does have in spades is strong characters and great storytelling. And it is in the strength of those character relationships that makes the polyamorous romances so strong.
There is just a single polyamorous relationship in the game between yourself, Octavia, and Regongar. While both characters can be romanced separately, it is seeing the depth of the shared love across all three of you that makes both of them even stronger as individual characters. It helps that it gives them a better ending, too.
I Was A Teenage Exocolonist is a game that plays like few others, and has an incredibly strong premise. You play as a child that grows over the years on this alien planet alongside your peers. These characters grow alongside you, but their relationships are not confined to just you, either. They all interact organically, shaped by your own and their choices.
Framed through card-based battles you gather as memories, there are ten different characters you’re able to romance. Some of them are open to polyamory, though the other options aren’t always strict monogamy either. There are multiple different combinations of polyamorous relationships, so you get to see how different characters react in such a scenario, too.
Crusader Kings 3 is a little different in this regard. You do play as a specific character throughout their whole life, though this is a much less curated experience than many other games would offer that have romance. However, that also gives you unprecedented control in that regard, letting youestablish a faith and culture that celebrates polygamy.
With the Polygamous doctrine, a ruler can take on multiple spouses. However, if their spouse also has this doctrine, they can have multiple spouses of their own. And with both rulers supporting polygamy, it means they can marry each other’s spouses, too. Sure, it will mostly be for political gain, but who’s to say you may’t find some love along the way?
Being a life sim, The Sims has always taken pride in portraying the many facets of life, even in its most mundane aspects. Romance forms a big part of life in The Sims, and relationships can be both as strong and fickle as they are in reality. However, it wasn’t until the Lovestruck expansion for The Sims 4 that relationships could finally be wider than strict monogamy.
In this way, you can define what exactly triggers jealously in your Sims, and how happy they are. This isn’t a strict on-off situation either, with you able to define your boundaries across multiple categories. You can even talk with other Sims during your game to offer the idea of an open relationship. They may disagree, but it’s nice to have the fluidity of the option present.
2Hades
If there was anything the Greek gods were known for, it was that they really got around. They still committed quite a large degree of infidelity, but this came more in the secrecy of the acts more than the actual existence of additional partners. And honing in on that particular aspect of Greek myth, Hades offers up two romance options.
Megaera and Thanatos are present throughout the whole game for Zagreus to express his feelings towards, though neither locks you out of being with the other. And while both romances are pursued independently, the game very much acknowledges your romantic interest with both of them together in various pieces of dialogue and some more, well, involved scenes.
1Date Everything
It’s all in the name really, isn’t it? In Date Everything, you truly can date just about everything in your home, from the simplest of utensils to the most abstract of concepts. And yes, you can romance every single one of them in a single run, too. But these relationships aren’t all a one-way street, either.
Certain characters, such as Washford and Drysdale, are very clearly in a strenuous relationship, and you’re able to slot yourself into the middle to solve it. There are plenty ofpre-built polyamorous relationshipslike this, and you can choose to bring these two characters and yourself together, or any combination of just the two. You can date everything, and you can love however you want, too.
