Games You Might Have Missed: Butterfly Soup

Butterfly Soup is a wildly funny and charming visual novel, created by Brianna Lei, about the relationships of queer Asian girls, and baseball.

Now, normally, if I hear the words “sports game” I immediately recoil. I’m not really a fan of sports in real life, so engaging with them digitally never really sounds fun to me. Luckily, despite it’s backdrop of baseball, Butterfly Soup is definitely not a sports game. Instead, it uses sports as a way to give context to the different relationships between the girls, and to provide a bit of rebellion in their otherwise rule-driven lives as the daughters of immigrant families with high expectations.

The game is split into four hour-ish long chapters, each focusing on one of the four characters: Korean-American Min-seo, Chinese-American Noelle, and Indian-American Diya and Akarsha. There are all kinds of jokes and comments that indicate what it’s like to be a girl coming from any of these cultures in America, from expectations on gender expression to scholastic performance. Even if you don’t come from one of these cultures (like me) the girls are still relateable as they deal with the trials and tribulations of parental expectations, young love, and existential dread that many teenagers face.

Characterization is really what makes Butterfly Soup a wonderful game. Diya is athletic, but suffers from social anxiety that borders on painful. Min-seo is simultaneously overly aggressive and sickeningly sweet depending on who she’s interacting with, and has a sense of justice that can’t be crushed. Noelle is 100% that nerd you knew who hated being wrong more than anything and would actually die before missing school. Akarsha is just weird. Wonderfully, wildly weird. She asks ridiculous questions and pulls crazy stunts, but she’s somehow still loveable despite that. The mixture of these personalities is anywhere from frustrating to cringe-worthy to absolutely heartwarming, all because each character is clearly written with detail and love so they feel like real people.

There are some very serious moments within the game, ones that are a bit hard to watch. But that only serves to deepen the emotional experience and give the ending a better payoff. Seeing the realities of these girls’ lives, the good and the really bad, brings you closer to them and creates an intricate story that still manages to be optimistic and encouraging. Playing this game ultimately made me feel happy and sated for a solid narrative about queer women that I had been sorely missing in other forms of media.

Butterfly Soup is a can’t-miss visual novel for anyone looking for a little more queer joy in these honestly bleak times. It’s smart, funny, sweet, and centers experiences that don’t often see the limelight. It’s available for PC, Mac, and Linux here. You can name your own price, but paying $5 or more gets you an additional PDF with commentary from Brianna Lei and exclusive additional art (which I highly recommend because it’s cute af).