Romance in video games is far from a new thing. Mario and Pauline were a couple back in 1981's Donkey Kong, and the first official "romance" game was 1982's Night Life. Since then, romance has become an integral part of video game storytelling – the same way it is for any narrative medium – as well as an entire game genre unto itself (such as visual novel games like Hatoful Boyfriend or Doki Doki Literature Club).
Unfortunately, up until recently, most video game romances have been strictly heterosexual. But luckily that's started to change, so here are some of the best current LGBTQ+ romances in gaming so far.
10 The Last of Us Part II's Main Romance Is Sweet, Despite Everything Else
Naughty Dog's The Last of Us Part II from 2020 is a prescient gritty post-apocalyptic action-survival game, as well as a devastating meditation on the corrosive effects of revenge. However, despite all that, the main love story between the protagonist (or at least one of the protagonists) Ellie and her girlfriend Dani is actually very sweet. In fact, towards the end of the story, Ellie is happily raising a child with Dani named JJ (named, in part, after her father-figure Joel). Even the ambiguous final ending leaves some room for hope of a potential reunion.
9 Life Is Strange Has A Bisexual Protagonist
Life is Strange is an episodic graphic adventure game from publisher Square Enix and developer Dontnod Entertainment. It's about a teenage girl named Max Caulfield, who discovers that she has the power to rewind time at will.
During the game, players are given various choices that affect how the story proceeds going forward. This includes choosing between her main romantic interests, which are her childhood friends Warren and Chloe – making Max explicitly bisexual. These choices markedly change the direction of the story (but only because these are fleshed-out characters), and their personalities help propel the story in different branching paths.
8 Gone Home Is About Discovering A Lesbian Romance
Released on PC in 2013, but set in 1995, the first-person adventure game Gone Home is about a young woman named Katie who visits her old childhood home, only to find it abandoned. As she searches through the house – interacting with objects and the like – she (and the player controlling her) discover, through environmental storytelling, a tragic lesbian romance between her younger sister Samantha and another girl named Yolanda that caused an unnecessary rift in the family. Luckily, it's implied they get together at the end (and also that the house might be haunted? Maybe?).
7 Dream Daddy: A Daddy Dating Simulator Kinda Says It All
Dream Daddy is a 2017 visual novel-esque dating simulator produced by popular Let's Play YouTubers Game Grumps (who also created the hectic side-scrolling Soviet Jump Game). Unlike most dating sims, which usually involve the player navigating a harem of various attractive women, this game instead focused on a recently single dad trying to find love with other single dads. This includes a goth dad, a bad dad, a nice dad, etc. While not the first LGBTQ+ visual novel (with the first released back in the late '80s), it's one of the most high-profile ones.
6 Overwatch's Tracer And Her Girlfriend Emily
Overwatch is (or at least was) one of the most popular competitive online first-person shooters out there. Unlike a lot of other gritty and militaristic FPS games on the market (aka Call of Duty or Halo), Overwatch was instead very vibrant and colorful, boasting a myriad of fun and interesting characters. In fact, most of the marketing was centered on the attractive female character Tracer, who is canonically a lesbian.
In fact, in the digital comic Reflections, fans found out that Tracer lives in a London apartment with her longtime girlfriend, Emily. There's even in-game text when players pick Tracer and play in the King's Row map where she wonders if she has time to see Emily.
5 Hades, In True Greek Mythology Fashion, Is Queer
Developer Supergiant's insanely fun and addicting roguelike hack-and-slash game Hades lives up to its Greek mythological origin by having the gods canonically queer (as anyone who's studied Greek history would know). The main character is Zagreus, the son of the eponymous Hades, Lord of the Underworld. He is also explicitly bisexual since there is in-game dialogue that implies he has romantic feelings for both the female Furie Megaera and the male god Thanatos.
4 The Outer Worlds Has A Prominent Ace Character
While homosexuality and bisexuality are part of the LGBTQ+ community, an often overlooked queer identity is asexuality. For those unaware, asexuality "is the lack of sexual attraction to others, or low or absent interest in or desire for sexual activity." This is why it's refreshing to see such a prominent character in a major video game – in this case the character Parvati from Take Two's sci-fi RPG The Outer Worlds. What's even better is that she is a fully fleshed-out character, and even has her own romantic subplot with another NPC, separate from the main character.
3 Mass Effect Allows For LGBTQ+ (And Alien) Dating Options
In the massively popular sci-fi action-RPG video game series Mass Effect, the player gets to choose the gender of their player character Commander Shephard. And, despite its heavy emphasis on action and space intrigue, interpersonal relationships (including romantic ones) are an integral part of the game as well. However, the cutscenes don't really change depending on the player's choice of gender (other than switching out Shepard's voice actor and their pronouns), so you can romance the same NPC's in the game (whose genders remain static), making some of them automatically homosexual (unless it's with Liara T’Soni, who's technically monosexual, but, eh...)
2 Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla Let You Choose Assassin's Sexuality
Like the Mass Effect entry above, Ubisoft's hit open-world action game Assassin's Creed: Valhalla allows players to choose the gender of their player character, named Eivor. And, like Mass Effect, despite its emphasis on action and leveling up a character's stats, romance is also a part of the game as well.
Furthermore, like both games, the cutscenes don't really change narratively (only the voice actor, character model, and character's pronouns do). This means that players can potentially romance NPCs of the same gender.
1 Saint's Row IV's Romance Options Are Surprisingly LGBTQ+ Friendly
Despite starting out as a more tasteless and bro-y take on the nascent Grand Theft Auto formula, the Saint's Row series later took a turn and became more colorful, goofy, and surprisingly progressive. In 2013's Saint's Row IV, a large part of the story takes place in a Matrix-like computer simulation, which allows it to satire and parody other video game franchises in the process. This includes the somewhat arbitrary ways romance is implemented in action games, like the aforementioned Mass Effect. And, since players can also change the gender of their character in SR IV, this can lead to successful homosexual romances as well.