Review: Raptor Boyfriend is the Senior Year I Wish I’d Had

I’m not new to Rocket Adrift’s games. Their last title, Order a Pizza, struck a chord with me for being a game willing to tackle its shitty dad head on, rather than trying to ease over years of abuse with simple shoulder touches. The level of emotional depth and nuance the Rocket Adrift team managed in Order a Pizza has carried over and grown with their new game, Raptor Boyfriend: A High School Romance. 

Raptor Boyfriend is a coming of age visual novel set in the  small but fantastical town of Ladle in the middle of nowhere Canada during the 90’s. Stella, our protagonist, used to visit Ladle every summer as a kid, but now, for her final year of high school, she’s moving there for real. Normally you’d expect a teen character who’s being forced to move to a small town during their senior year to be pretty pissed about it, but Stella is actually overjoyed. Her time living in the city was apparently mostly lonely and awkward, so getting a fresh start in a town she has nothing but good memories of is an exciting prospect. 

After making the first of several ridiculous plans on her way to school, Stella meets the first of the game’s three love interests, the titular raptor boyfriend, Robert Raptorson. He is a talking, skateboarding, prank-loving velociraptor, who also happens to be the class rep charged with showing you around the school. Robert is kind of the rule of this town rather than the exception. Ladle is a sort of sanctuary for cryptids and other magical creatures/folks whose existence should be impossible. Stella ultimately becomes the odd one out as the only human in her new friend group.

Day Lilly, the next friend Stella encounters in the halls of Ladle High, for example, is a fairy, complete with translucent wings and antennae. On top of that, she’s a bit of a tightly wound honor student who’s now looking to have some fun before graduation. And she’s being haunted by her kind-of-girlfriend who happens to be a literal ghost, Ingrid. 

The final part of Raptor Boyfriend’s main cast is Taylor Tall-Toe. He’s the only person in town that Stella really knows, since they attended his parents’ summer camp in Ladle together when they were kids. But, Stella stopped writing to him when she moved away in middle school, so she doesn’t really know what to expect with him. She becomes the unexpected one when she crashes her truck into him in the midst of a panic attack. Oh, also he’s a bigfoot.

Taylor, Day, Robert, and Stella become an unlikely group of friends thanks to hanging out after Stella’s first day of school. But it’s apparent pretty early on that Stella wants things to become more with one of her new friends. From the get-go, it’s clear that Stella finds each of these classmates attractive, and is definitely down to explore her options with them. It’s up to you to decide which one she tries to get to know better. Throughout the game, you get opportunities to select one character to focus on, whether that’s driving them home last, or calling them after school. 

This isn’t your standard dating sim fodder. Each character has a life and past outside of Stella that they’re still trying to deal with, all while attempting to move into whatever comes next. While charming, and sweet without being saccarchine, these romances aren’t clean or easy. Despite being cryptids, your friends/love interests are deeply human and can have uglier sides to them. But that’s what really makes this game shine. 

Robert, Taylor, and Day don’t feel like dolls you’re low-effort wooing. They have their own issues, insecurities, and fears they’re tangling with, and sometimes they don’t handle these things well. Conversely, they each have distinct interests that you can delve deeper into as collectibles if you remember certain things they told you throughout your conversations. 

Stella, on the other hand, feels a little less balanced in her characterization. The game’s depiction of her anxiety is almost too realistic, especially when it has so much weight in the story. Stella is awkward, scared of the world, and generally thinks of herself as deeply uncool and someone that should be different. These traits make her extremely relatable as a protagonist, but they tend to also overshadow anything else about who she is. 

With her awkward disposition and general thirst, Stella could be a character on par with the likes of Tina Belcher, but she doesn’t quite make it there. Her past is kind of a blank slate of moving around and goody-two-shoes-ery, and the couple of interests she’s revealed to have are largely left in the background. Stella’s future only ever comes up as part of the plot towards the end. She doesn’t express her hopes or plans for what’s to come, she’s just focused on goofy plans and trying to get a smooch from her crush. Which on some level is relatable, but in a game so focused about dealing with the past to move into the future, Stella’s journey just doesn’t really measure up to her counterparts. 

That said, her arcs with each character one-on-one largely make up for this. Rocket Adrift’s skill with honest depictions of relationships shines through when Stella has to face the challenges each of her friends are dealing with. These conversations are often painful and messy, but always earnest. Stella is kind of a background character in her own life, but she’s pivotal to these other characters’ growth, all while being pretty humanly fallible. 

The game’s stylish and expressive art style, full of bold lines and saturated colors, helps to accentuate all this. Tiny details make all the difference, like the character portraits on the phone screen that look at you and smile when you mouse over them, or outfits that change with the seasons. Each expression makes the emotions both said and unsaid resonate more, and each style shows a little more of who these kids are. 

Raptor Boyfriend is honestly the coming of age I wish I had had. While still messy, still awkward, still stressful, ultimately these stories are about acceptance, healthy communication, setting boundaries, and moving on. To be able to learn to be vulnerable, honest, and secure as young as these characters get to? I’d give anything for that.