If you asked me to summarize Hatoful Boyfriend in a sentence, it would include several endearingly-applied, exasperated expletives and a forceful proclamation of its pervasive, undeniable weirdness. How you sum up something that seemingly defies any logical description?

There’s a genre of text-heavy adventure games originating from Japan that involve attempting to earn the love of digital characters. These games tend to get lumped together under the Western term "dating sims." There is a subset of these called "otome games." Targeted towards women players, they feature female protagonists surrounded by attractive men, and over the course of the game, the protagonist can potentially earn the love of one of many available suitors. Not many of these titles have been released in English; the Hakuoki series is probably the most visible example, though several others have recently appeared on smartphone app stores and on PC digital download services like Steam.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, at its core, Hatoful Boyfriend is an otome game. It’s got the classic shoujo-manga male character archetypes that pervade such games (as well as much of Japanese women-oriented popular media): the earnest and hardworking boy next door, the caring teacher, the secretive psychopath, the snooty pampered rich boy, the track star, the ladies’ man, and the quiet, spiritually tortured introvert. They’re all students at the same high school, that most archetypical of Japanese story settings, and it’s up to you, playing as heroine Hitori (or any name you so please), to find the boy of your dreams.

This isn’t a typical Japanese high school, mind you: this is St. PigeoNation’s, an elite academy for the nation’s best and brightest birds. You’re the first--and only--human to enroll in this school for intelligent, talking birds. All those available men I mentioned above? Birds. All of them. Photorealistic birds that only ever appear as static visualizations over the course of the game.

It gets weirder. In the Hatoful Boyfriend universe, birds have become Nobel Prize winners, famous bloggers, and government officials. Your birdie boyfriends-to-be may constantly fall asleep, obsess over pudding, and believe that they are dark heroes fighting for the fate of the universe. Hitori herself apparently lives in a literal cave, which is simply accepted as normal.

In fact, very little seems to faze Hitori--she just goes about her school life, interacting with the various fowl personalities with nary a second thought. Gameplay is simplistic even for the genre, consisting entirely of reading text and selecting choices that tell Hitori what to say and where to go. Additional options are unlocked on subsequent playthroughs, allowing you to explore alternative pathways to avian romance. There are quite a few endings to uncover, and if you want every in-game achievement, you’ll have to explore all possible routes to true love. Some of these can be rather annoying to earn, especially when individual characters are attached to more than one ending variant; you’ll see a lot of the same dialogue many times over, though a built-in text skip helps ease the monotony somewhat.

But there’s a genuine--though somewhat inexplicable--charm to Hatoful Boyfriend that works in its favor, even with the simplistic mechanics and occasional text annoyances. Before you know it, you're caught up in the weird, weird world of making dove-eyes to actual doves. Eventually, thanks to the fast-forward option and copious save slots, you’ll have seen the routes for several birds and have had a few puzzling encounters--events that seem strange even in this bizarre reality.

And then, after several of these fairly breezy playthroughs, Hatoful Boyfriend’s narrative completely pulls the rug out from under you, transforming into an altogether different beast. By this point, what seemed like a weird and ridiculous concept is now completely acceptable and believable to you, so when the game goes off the rails in such an unexpected direction, you are absolutely blindsided… until you think about what’s happened, what you’ve seen up to that point, and realize that this revelation was there in front of you the whole time.

It’s this sudden, perception-shattering twist that remakes Hatoful Boyfriend from a bizarre parody into a memorable visual adventure. The way it works on you is subtle and ingenious: by the time the story moves forward, you have a genuine emotional investment in its characters, all of whom are just photographs of birds superimposed upon drawn backgrounds. Hatoful Boyfriend is a showcase of how clever writing and engaging characters can make even the strangest of concepts feel absolutely real.

Hatoful Boyfriend is a unique experience, one that goes well beyond its bonkers concept and intentionally strange visual presentation. I was expecting to simply giggle at a nonsensical game in which I tried to woo feathered men, and what I received instead was wholly and wonderfully unexpected. Anyone with a taste for the unusual would do well to enjoy the company of these fetching fowl.