Warning: The following article contains links and references contain profanity and adult themes. Reader discretion is advised.

Yandere Simulator is a game that frequently comes up in gaming circles as a punchline. However, unlike jokey simulator games like Goat Simulator, Yandere Simulator is a serious game that nobody respects or takes seriously. In fact, calling it a game is somewhat of a stretch, as it is only this month that the developer has gotten around to finishing up the first main enemy to take on in the game. Of course, you might be one of those casual gamers that has no idea what this game’s deal is, so here’s a real quick read to summarize the important things about this game.

Yandere Simulator is a game made by a developer going by YandereDev, where you play as an anime yandere girl who aims to get rid of all the girls in the way of her crush. On paper, it may seem like a neat concept, being a stealth psychological horror game where you are the horror. However, keep in mind that this game has been in development since 2014. There’s nothing wrong with long development times, but there’s so much to dig into with this game that the long development is something that deserves scrutiny.

The game was pitched by the developer to 4chan users, who responded to the idea positively and offered their own ideas. With that, the game started to take shape. Again, on the surface, things seem fine. YandereDev seems open about development, releasing public test builds on a regular basis. Youtubers like Markiplier ate the game up, contributing to the game’s rise. However, as the game’s popularity rose, so did the amount of stuff in the game.

Yandere Simulator suffers from horrible feature creep. Throughout the past few years, YandereDev’s been piling in features and tidbits that are far beyond his scope, seeing as the game is mostly made by himself (more on that later). One can plainly see the problem by looking at the development log for the game. A lot of the early stuff is reasonable things, like adding teachers and implementing school schedules, because that stuff makes sense for the setting and helps form the game’s backbone. However, things just expanded further from there from adding the ability to kidnap characters to adding school clubs with their own distinct characters and functions.

The most condemning thing about this is Osana. Yandere Simulator has a set of rival characters who have their own crushes on the main character’s crush, making them the “bosses” of the game. Osana is the first of them and is essentially the “tutorial boss” of Yandere Simulator, originally added to the game in November of 2014. Osana literally entered the end of her development at the start of this year, according to the developer’s own devblog. To have the first main threat of the game enter the final stages of development at least 5 years later really speaks to the lack of focus in the game.

One issue with feature creep is that besides creating more things to handle, it opens the way for more bugs. New mechanics can not only have glitches in themselves, but they can also have issues with pre-existing things in the game, passing glitches on to that stuff. In this unreasonable push for more, Yandere Simulator just becomes buggier and the finish line becomes ever distant.

Surely, Yandere Simulator‘s development would get along with the help of others, right? Well, the problem is, YandereDev is known for being unable to take criticism or work with others. Most infamously, there was a brief period in time where tinyBuild took the game under its wing in 2017. However, YandereDev had trouble working with a programmer from tinyBuild and the partnership ended in December of that year, rejecting the chance for the game to properly get things done. What makes it insane is that YandereDev’s own coding practices (show above) are horribly inefficient. Granted, you can still make quality games with poor coding; Terry Cavanagh, creator of VVVVVV, recently released the source code to his game, showing off that the famous indie platformer was built on its own impractical coding. However, to drop somebody that’s likely way more experienced for the sake of impractical coding is just insane.

YandereDev tends to be criticized for not being a hard worker for somebody that rakes in thousands of dollars in Patreon money a month. One frequent criticism is that he sometimes spends hours doing livestreams. In fact, checking into his Twitch channel, he’s recently been doing livestreams of the recently released Dragon Ball Z: Kakarot, which seems kinda counter-intuitive to being in the final stretch of development for what’s supposed to be a big milestone.

Speaking of livestreams, YandereDev’s personality is… abrasive, at best. There are many recorded instances of him threatening viewers on his livestreams, such as here, for one thing. He frequently blocks people that are negative toward him, and, for a time, the comments on his YouTube videos were blocked due to people criticizing him for not focusing on Osana and for his silence on his collapsed partnership with tinyBuild. His previously public Discord also booted anyone that criticized him or made fun of him. Sadly, they were also booted just for making him angry over whatever. This ultimately culminated in people speedrunning themselves getting kicked out of his server and him closing off his Discord to non-Twitch subscribers.

pic.twitter.com/RQOwAwAjxC

— Struggle Discord Posts (@strugglediscord) January 20, 2020

Additionally, he’s also a bit of a creep. Besides some questionable content in Yandere Simulator like a focus on panties for high school girls, he’s also openly shown that he’s a bit of a freak. The screenshot above shows an apparent interaction on his Discord server, which is… strange. While he claims that it’s a joke, another Twitter user pointed out that according to his own poll, a sizable chunk of his audience is underage, which makes it a pretty bad joke to expose them to.

There are plenty of round-ups on Yandere Simulator and YandereDev that you can find around the place. However, part of why I chose to write my own is that some of those round-ups come from bad places or delve too much into his past. I tried to avoid talking about his past here because I won’t berate a scummy teen too much for being a scummy teen. Instead, I focus on the now, where he is a scummy adult making more than most people I know a month to make a game that doesn’t look like it will finish anytime soon.

I sincerely like some of the ideas in Yandere Simulator. In researching this, I can see the allure of a smaller scale Hitman-style game that’s dense in interactivity; think of how Yakuza gets compared to Grand Theft Auto. However, YandereDev isn’t a big studio that could actually pull that off. YandereDev is one man with a severe lack of focus, bad practices and bad ideas that is somehow making thousands a month in spite of it all. Meritocracy is fake and I don’t blame people for dunking on this man.

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