Tomorrow is Valentine's Day and Blizzard is celebrating with a cute treat for Overwatch 2 fans, an actual dating sim visual novel.
LoverWatch: Love Never Dies is a "totally real, totally-non canon" visual novel that follows the well-greased trope of pursuing love with supernatural help. In this case, you can either try to date Mercy or Genji with the help of Cupid Hanzo.
It's playable on browsers and you can find it here. You can also check out a trailer below in case you're not ready to try your romantic fortunes just yet.
Blizzard is making absolutely sure that fans understand that nothing that happens in the visual novel extends to the canon lore of the main game, so much so that you actually get an explanation of what "non-canon" means when you start the experience. We wouldn't want people to be confused, would we?
The developer actually sought professional help to create LoverWatch, as the credits showcase the participation of Psyop and Akupara Games, who worked on dating sim spinoffs of other big games including Ghostwire Tokyo and Dead by Daylight. Apparently, this is becoming a sub-genre in its own right.
By completing LoverWatch and unlocking the secret ending, you can actually earn a cute themed Play of the Game Highlight animation, which you can see in the trailer above.
Overwatch 2 is currently available for PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, and PC. It's free-to-play, so you can try it out without a purchase, but, of course, it has plenty of optional microtransactions. Speaking of which, Season 3 just started a few days ago.
In case you're not familiar with the game, it's the successor of the original hero first-person shooter Overwatch, which was active between 2016 and 2022. It features a sci-fi story set in a future version of Earth where humanity and the robotic Omics are struggling for dominance and survival, while the titular reformed international task force Overwatch attempts to maintain order as terrorists organization raise and corporate conflicts ensue.
While the game doesn't have a single-player story mode for now, it's slated to be released at some point in 2023.
