The Symbiant Review – Intergalactic Dates Are A-OK, Right?

A quick disclaimer: This review will be much shorter than usual due to The Symbiant being a concise game. To stay relatively spoiler-free, I have decided to cut it very short. With that said…where to begin…Oh, right. You have the boy meets girl. Girl meets girl. And boy meets boy. But what if you replace the second boy with a hot alien from outer space? Well, that’s the premise behind The Symbiant, the latest BL game by HeartCoreDev.

The Symbiant’s story takes place in 5066, where Danya and his alien friend Juniper are manning The Ameretat, a spaceship tasked with transporting goods along the Milky Way.

After being unable to obtain jobs and being entirely out of money, the duo suddenly accepts a pretty simple request: A handsome alien named Brahve needs help transporting a certain…” plant” aboard the ship.

At first glance, it seems like a straightforward premise: going from point A to point B. And the route that Brahve wants to take is to the safest place in the galaxy. But what follows soon after are six weeks of Danya’s attraction to this sexy blue alien, and I mean it both literally and figuratively. And that’s because the “plant” abroad is not described as one.

As you go through the narrative, you’ll learn a lot about the characters, from their profession to their past. And who am I fooling? This is a BL game, so that Danya will develop feelings for Brahve. Whether you enable the 18+ patch or not, the two of them will do “it,” though there is a key difference in what happens: If you do not enable the adult option, the game skips any NSFW scenes entirely. Furthermore, scenes that show a bit of cleavage are all subtle at best. The most you’ll get is swearing, but come on. It’s 2023. A little swearing isn’t the end of the world.

I honestly was wondering how the All-Ages patch managed to reach a 14+ age rating in my country because past experiences have always revealed to me that, for the most part, developers strive for a 16. Even then, that’s done by zooming in on certain shots and with additional layers of clothing over the questionable parts.

There’s not much I can talk about the gameplay, honestly. It’s a visual novel, plain and simple, with your usual choice answers. The UI is rather simplistic, and I don’t have any complaints about the font. As I’ve said previously at the beginning, the entire narrative can be completed in a span of 2 to 3 hours, and that’s if you’re going for every single achievement. Furthermore, though there are multiple endings, at the end of the day, there is only one love interest aboard: Brahve. And no, Juniper isn’t an option; she’s already got, someone.

The worldbuilding of The Symbiant is relatively self-contained, with all events happening solely inside The Amaretat, with other locations such as Juniper’s home planet, or Brahve’s home, all being mentioned in text only. I wish the tale were a lot longer, but still.

I had an excellent experience with The Symbiant, but my biggest gripe has got to be just how relatively short it is to go through it all. Nonetheless, I laughed a lot at the interactions with Brahve and Danya, perhaps even more than I should. The adult patch is not for the faint-hearted, but if you’re willing to be “brave” (pun intended), then maybe this short experience is just what you need.