I spent Valentine’s Day not with my wife but with 18 Turkish women. No, wait, I can explain. It’s a new game called Speed Dates – Winter Edition, which I only chanced upon when I searched “Winter Games” on Xbox Live hoping for some Olympics fare. And boy, did I find it!
The game is in Turkish, with English subtitles. It already feels arthouse; like those films Channel 4 used to show with a red triangle in the corner of the screen.
You are a bloke named Murat wandering around downtown when you bump into a lady friend who recommends you join her for a speed dating night. You agree and the game starts. This is the kind of fast-paced zero-exposition white-knuckle opening that we haven’t seen since Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
You are presented with a list of women. You click on them. You speed date. In glorious full-motion video! I fondly remember the wide arrival of FMV in the 90s. Mad Dog McCree, The 7th Guest, Command and Conquer, Phantasmagoria, Wing Commander 3: FMV was the first sign that video games could take on Hollywood. I thought the genre had been washed away by a tsunami of uncanny valley high-end graphics, but the auteur behind Speed Dating pays fulsome tribute with what I can only assume is deliberate buffering and stuttering of the cinematic scenes, like Scorsese deliberately making Raging Bull in black and white.
My first date doesn’t go well. Aylin has two kids and asks if I would consider adopting them. I say I would love to, although that is a lie. I don’t even want to adopt my own kids let alone someone else’s. Is this how speed dating works? Do people leap in there with the big stuff? I guess you have to.
The camera work is weird. Your dates look just off camera, in accordance with classic movie dialogue convention. But your guy? He looks directly into the camera at YOU. This makes no sense until I realise this is obviously a homage to French New Wave cinema.
I fail to connect with Ayla because I refuse to say her kids look cute, and move on to Leyla who is a very different Kettle of Plenty of Fish, wearing one of those tops with a giant circle cut out of the centre region. I want to tell her she will catch her death of cold, but instead I have to tell her if I prefer to be dominant or dominated?
I don’t really want either, but the game demands I pick one. I am too old to start stuffing ball gags into my gob, so I say I want to be dominant. She is happy with this because she wants a strong man. She then asks what my favourite food is. I have three options. Stuffed green pepper. Turkish ravioli. Or raw meatballs. Of course I go for the raw meatballs. I’m not stupid.
She switches back to sex again and asks what my fantasy is. For some reason, the game doesn’t let me choose an option. Instead, my guy says he would want to be invisible so he can hear what people say about him. Talk about unexpected dialogue twists. Did David Mamet write this? I match with Leyla. Get in there!
Eda breaks my heart. She asks me what I would do in the event of a zombie invasion. Wow! I literally think of this question every day of my waking life, priding myself on the fact that in all of the 26 houses I have lived in I have made zombie-related defensive and escape plans within the first week. But she tells me she would want to become one of the zombies. Plot twist! We do not match.
I start playing this as a game, where the point is to match with everybody. It’s quite enjoyable clawing your way back from a bad start by becoming a pandering simp to a date’s every whim. I tell animal rights activist Ezgi that I have an idea about using city garbage trucks to dispense food to animals. I tell YouTuber Ayse that I follow many YouTubers. I tell bespectacled accountant Pinar that I jolly well do have a financial retirement plan. All lies. All matches.
The game is lazily stereotypical at times. All the women love shopping. They all ask me about my favourite food. Sadly, the raw meatballs never come up as an option again. But the dialogue constantly surprises me. I get asked by Esra if I inherited any traits from my family. The only response options I have are CLUTTER and PANIC. I never know where this game will go.
Eighteen speed dates later I have matched with eight women, which isn’t bad considering I have been out of the scene for three decades. And then … nothing. What I thought would be an end scene where I picked the lucky lady of my choosing instead sees Murat simply thank his friend for inviting him, and wandering off into the night.
Some may find this anticlimactic. I prefer to think of it as the top spinning at the end of Inception, because I am still wondering what the hell I experienced here. What I can say is that it was the best five quid I have spent in years. Speed Dating – Winter Edition is surprising and engaging, as all great art should be – even if most of the time it is completely and utterly unintentionally so.
