Please Don't Date the Tutorial

THIS IS NOT A DATING SIM.

You have inherited a failing roadside motel. Every room is haunted by a different supernatural disaster—and every one of them thinks you are here to romance it.

Mina, your adorable and relentlessly helpful tutorial, is delighted about this. She wants you to raise affection. She would like that very much.

There is only one problem:

Affection is fuel. The moment a guest believes it is loved, it becomes strong enough to leave its room.

Every answer you choose changes three hidden values:

• Affection makes the entity stronger.
• Suspicion makes the entity look more closely at you.
• Amusement is the only leash you have. A bored ghost finds its own entertainment—and it finds it in one of the occupied rooms.

The interface shows you only Affection. There is a Night Auditor's Manual behind the front desk that reveals all three values, if you think to look for it.

Survive seven night shifts. Be polite to a vampire who faints at the word blood. Negotiate with a possessed vending machine that speaks only in product codes. Accept a bathroom mirror's increasingly upsetting gifts. Work out why your exhausted co-worker is the only normal person in the building—and why that is the most alarming thing about them.

But Mina is not teaching you how to play.

She is training you to make one exact sequence of choices, because it is the only thing that will let her leave.

She reads your save files. She remembers the routes you abandoned. As the week progresses, she begins editing the menus—and the words on the buttons stop matching what the buttons do.

Some endings cannot be reached in a single week. The only way to learn certain things is to get them wrong in a timeline that no longer exists.

Everything you carry out of a failed run, you keep.

Features

• Seven night shifts across a motel with six rooms and seven keys.
• A three-number system that lies to you. Affection, Suspicion and Amusement change with every choice, but only one is initially visible.
• Being nice is dangerous. Polite answers feed the entities. Ridiculous answers may keep everyone alive—and sometimes reveal the week's true shape.
• A tutorial that edits the game. Menu captions rewrite themselves while you read them. Scene labels redirect to versions Mina prepared. The action behind a button never changes; only its words do.
• Real save awareness. Mina reads the game's save slots, annotates the load screen and remembers which timeline you returned from.
• Cross-timeline knowledge. Clues survive death and restarting. One ending requires information learned in a run that ended badly.
• Five endings, recorded on a Rota screen that appears on the main menu after your first completed shift.
• Approximately 14,400 words, five speaking entities and one vending machine with strong opinions.
• Procedurally generated art and audio. Every image and sound is produced by the scripts included in tools/.

Estimated playtime

• First playthrough: 40–60 minutes
• All five endings and every clue: 3–4 hours

A single run reveals roughly one-third of the script. The hub allows only two or three actions per night, so the things you skip become genuinely different content on the next run.

Content warnings

Please read these before playing. A few are unusual.

Horror and distress

• Sustained dread, isolation and unsettling imagery. No jump scares.
• Off-screen deaths of motel guests, described rather than shown.
• Repeated player-character death; the story continues afterwards.
• Multiplied and distorted figures, eyes and ambiguous crowds. No gore.

Themes

• Manipulation, gaslighting and coercion by a character who presents herself as kind.
• Entrapment in a job and institutional indifference to a worker's death.

Fourth-wall effects

• On night five, the game simulates a crash with a fake error screen styled after the engine. This is part of the story; nothing has gone wrong.
• One ending includes a fake uninstall sequence and progress bar. This is also part of the story, and the ending explicitly confirms it.
• The game reads and comments on its own save files.
• Nothing outside the game's save folder is read, written, moved or deleted. The game does not connect to the internet.

Photosensitivity

• Brief glitch effects with rapid colour changes and flickering, primarily around deaths and during nights five through seven.

Not present

No sexual content, on-screen gore, profanity or animal harm.