I seriously want more games where balancing feelings, stress, and friendships are a legit thing.

More than just "let's level up in this friendship in a linear way" or "get enough points here until you end up in a relationship". Hell, sometimes relationships won't actually end up a thing, they'll draw a hard boundary, and you should frikkin' respect it.

@Ulfra_Wolfe Yeah, I've always found meaningfully depicting friendship in games to be very difficult, because conventional game structure has [Goals] [Obstacles to Goals] [Way to Achieve Goals / Navigate Obstacles] and any attempt at applying that gamification to friendship automatically veers into "Ew this is gross" territory.

@Ulfra_Wolfe My goto example for this is an old Yu-Gi-Oh PS2 game we played when we were younger- You would have to get a friend to be close enough friends with you to want to be Dualing Partners in a 2v2 finale that was your school's Final Exam.

Not having one person sufficiently high-friend-level by then was a Game Over when the exam starts.. And the only way to make someone like you more was finding out their favourite type of sandwich then *incessantly throwing sandwiches at them at every opportunity*.