"The Love of Yin and Yang" is a Taoist-themed elimination + romantic comedy produced by a small domestic independent studio. The charging model says 0, yes, you read that right, not a penny will be charged. It can run on Android 5.0, and I can carry it with an old phone.
Let me first talk about why this game makes me, an old stand-alone player, comfortable. The protagonist, Yuxuan, is a little Taoist priest with poor Taoist skills. He is crushed by his fellow disciple Adi in all aspects. He goes out to exorcise evil spirits and is treated as a joke by the residents of the small town. This is not the counterattack that we are tired of playing at the beginning, it is really useless, and it is down to earth. As a result, a mysterious alchemist suddenly took a liking to him and wanted to recruit him as his grandson-in-law? When I went there, I discovered that my granddaughter Xiaobai had already passed away. It turned out that she was interested in his "spirit-gathering" physique and wanted to use him to resurrect her granddaughter. Good guy, this twist directly burned my CPU, but it makes sense when I think about it carefully. The feeling of "there must be a pitfall when everything falls in the sky" suddenly came out.
The point is that it's an elimination gameplay, not the kind of routine that forces you to buy props to extend your life after each level. There are no stamina bars, no diamonds, and no disgusting pop-ups that say "You're one step away from passing, just spend 6 yuan to buy three steps." I played for three or four hours. If I couldn't beat it, I would try a few more times. If I couldn't move the grid with my brain, I could still push it. Is this really a game? It's not like a certain factory that opens a treasure box and wants you to watch a thirty-second advertisement.
Speaking of which, I'm going to fire up the map cannon. The so-called “love mobile games” on the market now are all krypton gold sow farms. There are 300 characters in the card pool, and your probability of winning is lower than going out to step on dog poop. After finally drawing one, I had to draw six more fragments to break through. After breaking through, I had to unlock the bond, and for the bond, I had to buy a monthly card... A set cost several thousand dollars and I smashed it in, and I couldn't even see a paper person kissing me. What's even more outrageous is that "Yin Yang Love" directly gives you a dead fiancée. You just want to spend money to resurrect her, but the game doesn't give you this entry at all. You can only rely on the plot to push forward step by step and see how the unlucky Yuxuan and a group of Taoist priests engage in ridiculous daily life.
I bet that if this game were reskinned and replaced with something like "Onmyoji: Love Contract", and 648 songs were recharged to give out-of-print shikigami, the comment section would have been kneeling. But they just chose not to do anything fictitious, and focused entirely on the script and character interaction. The bickering between Yuxuan and his senior brother Adi, the ghost Xiaobai popping up from time to time to tease people, the old alchemist's cynical calculations, each character lives like a friend around you, rather than just a draw card data with a rarity tag.
Of course, this game is not without its shortcomings. The graphics are quite rough, with a mixture of pixel style and hand-painting, which is incomparable with those assembly-line two-dimensional masterpieces. The sound effects are just like that. When the blocks are eliminated, it sounds like swatting mosquitoes. But the victory lies in sincerity! Have you ever seen any free game that dares to write the love line in such a flesh-and-blood way? Do you dare to believe that I, a grown man, almost got wet when I saw Xiaobai secretly leaving a note beside Yuxuan's bed? These days, even serious love dramas are industrial saccharine, while others have a theme of entertainment, but they make the emotions solid.
Finally, let me be honest. Isn't it because the original stand-alone game industry was forced to engage in piracy because the market is full of krypton gold traps? A zero-charge independent gadget like "Yin Yang Love" may not make any money, and may go bankrupt next month, but at least it makes me feel that there are still people in the game industry who are doing something serious. I don't expect it to be popular, but I hope that those mobile game planners who are thinking about activity, payment rate, and seven-day retention all day long will occasionally open this game and take a look - it turns out that it can make people play with a smile without forcing players to pay.
Anyway, I pushed it. If you like krypton, go to krypton. I will continue to fall in love with my ghost wife👻