Dating Sims Like Love and Deepspace: Where to Go After Version 6.0
If you are searching for this, you probably already know why. The summer of 2026 was rough for Love and Deepspace, and a lot of people who have been playing since launch are quietly looking around at what else exists. This page is that list — but organised by what you actually liked about the game, because "games like Love and Deepspace" means five completely different things depending on which part of it hooked you.
A quick, non-dramatic summary of what happened
In late June 2026, Papergames revealed Valko, a werewolf tech executive who was to be the game's sixth love interest, debuting in Version 6.0 on 9 July. A large portion of the player base — the reporting consistently points to the Chinese community as the loudest — objected, not primarily to Valko himself but to the studio adding a sixth romance while the existing five had gone long stretches without meaningful story updates.
Papergames cancelled Valko outright on 30 June, and went further: no sixth love interest, ever, and no new love interests in future content plans. That reversal produced a second wave of anger from the Western side of the fandom, who had been looking forward to him. Combined with a boycott of in-game purchases and a genuinely thin content stretch, the game's July revenue came in around 10.3 million dollars — down roughly 73 percent from about 38 million in June, and the worst month in its history.
Whether that is a temporary dip or the start of something worse is not knowable yet, and anyone telling you confidently either way is guessing. What is knowable is that a lot of players have suddenly got resources they are not spending and evenings they are not filling. So.
First, work out what you are actually replacing
Love and Deepspace is an unusual composite. It is a 3D otome game with a customisable female protagonist, a gacha card system, real-time-ish texting and calls, an action combat layer, and a production budget that dwarfs almost everything else in the genre. Very few games do all of that. Almost every game does one of them better than Love and Deepspace does.
So the useful question is: which layer were you actually there for?
If you were there for the live-service loop
You want new content on a schedule, a card collection, and characters who exist in your phone every day. These are the closest structural matches.
Tears of Themis is HoYoverse's otome game, and it is the most direct comparison in terms of polish and cadence. You play a rookie attorney in the city of Stellis, working legal cases alongside four love interests while a larger conspiracy unwinds. The card-and-gacha structure will feel immediately familiar, the case-solving gives you something to do that is not combat, and — relevant right now — it is backed by a studio with no shortage of resources.
Mr Love: Queen's Choice is, literally, Love and Deepspace's older sibling. Same publisher lineage, same Mr. Love series. It is 2D rather than 3D and its production values are of an earlier era, but the DNA is unmistakable: four love interests, superpowers, a media-executive protagonist, and the same rhythm of story chapters and character cards. If what you miss is specifically the Papergames writing sensibility, this is the closest you will get without playing Love and Deepspace.
Obey Me! takes the same free-to-play structure into a demon-brothers comedy. You are the sole human exchange student at a demon academy, and the game leans much harder into humour than Love and Deepspace ever does. It also does the in-app messaging thing well — the characters text you, and the phone interface is a real part of the experience.
If you were there for the texting and the phone intimacy
Mystic Messenger is the answer, and it is not close. Released in 2016, it is the game that proved a phone-native otome game could pull in players worldwide, and it is still the purest expression of the idea. The game runs on real time — chatrooms open at actual hours of the actual day, and if you sleep through the 3 a.m. one, you miss it. It is low-budget next to Love and Deepspace and makes no attempt to compete on spectacle. What it has instead is the specific, slightly unwell feeling of a group chat that will not wait for you.
Fair warning: the real-time design is either the best or the worst thing about it, depending entirely on your job.
If you are done with gacha entirely
This is where most of the genre actually lives. Premium otome games are one-time purchases, on Switch and Steam, with no energy systems, no pity counters, and no monthly revenue chart to worry about. The trade-off is that they are finite — you finish them.
Collar x Malice drops you into a police procedural in a Shibuya under lockdown by a terrorist group. The protagonist is a police officer who gets fitted with a poisoned collar and ends up investigating alongside five ex-cops. Romance genuinely takes a back seat to the mystery for long stretches, which some people love and some people find frustrating. If you liked Love and Deepspace's plot more than its dates, start here.
Bustafellows is the same idea run through a noir filter — a crooked lawyer, two underground surgeons, a hacker, and a protagonist who can leap into other people's bodies to change the past. It is more stylised and more fun than Collar x Malice, and it already has a sequel out with another on the way, so there is runway.
even if TEMPEST opens with the protagonist being burned at the stake and goes on from there into witch trials and inquisitors. If your favourite Love and Deepspace routes were the ones with an actual power imbalance and a genuine threat in them, this is the one. Gothic, ornate, and considerably darker than most of the genre.
Café Enchanté is the opposite mood entirely: you inherit a café that turns out to be a crossroads between worlds, and you serve coffee to angels, demons and the bureaucrats who monitor them. Cosy, warm, low-stakes. Good for when you want the genre without the adrenaline.
Variable Barricade is the comedy option. Hibari is the heir to a fortune and her grandfather has installed four eligible bachelors in a mansion with her to force the issue. She is not having it. The protagonist's active refusal to play along is the whole joke and it lands.
Hakuoki: Kyoto Winds is the historical epic — late Edo-era Kyoto, the Shinsengumi, twelve romanceable characters and around thirty endings. It is also historically the game that proved to Western publishers that an English-language otome audience existed at all, when Aksys localised the original in 2012. There is a direct sequel, Edo Blossoms.
Jack Jeanne is the one to play if you only play one. Kisa Tachibana enters an all-boys theatre school, has to hide her gender for a year, and has to win the school's top performing honour. The art is by Sui Ishida of Tokyo Ghoul, there are rhythm minigames and stat-raising, and the ensemble cast works together on productions rather than orbiting the protagonist individually. It reads more like a sports anime than a romance, in the good way.
Obscura is worth flagging separately because it is English-developed rather than localised. It is set in a black market where masked buyers trade in things that cannot be bought elsewhere, all the love interests are men, and you pick the protagonist's gender at the start — a softening of otome convention that English-language studios tend to make.
If the anime art was never the point for you
This is the group nobody writes lists for, so here is the honest version: if you were playing Love and Deepspace for the relationship — the daily contact, the character who knows your history, the choices that accumulate — and the anime aesthetic was something you tolerated rather than something you sought out, the genre is much thinner for you. Most of it is drawn in some register of anime.
The non-anime shelf exists but it skews indie, Western, and comedic: Dream Daddy, Monster Prom, Boyfriend Dungeon, Date Everything!. We have written that up properly on the non-anime dating sims page, because it is a genuinely different set of recommendations rather than a filter on this one.
DM with Me sits in that group too, and since this is our site, it is fair to be upfront about the trade-off. It is a free browser dating sim built around one character, Elise, across ten locations, with conversations that respond to you rather than branching through pre-written routes. That means no five-route replay structure, no voice cast, no thirty endings. What it does instead is continuity — the story remembers what you did, and there is nothing to roll for.
No gacha, no download, no roster to save for
Ten locations, one story, and choices that stick. Free to play in your browser.
Play DM with MeA note on the "is Love and Deepspace dying" question
It is worth being precise here, because a lot of the discourse is not. One bad month is one bad month. The game earned somewhere between 30 and 60 million dollars a month for most of the preceding year, and a boycott is by definition a thing people stop doing. The structural concern is different and slower: a permanent commitment to five love interests forever means the game's growth now depends entirely on deepening existing routes, which is a harder and less reliably monetisable thing to do than adding a sixth boyfriend.
You do not have to bet on it either way. Otome is not a monogamous genre. Most people playing Love and Deepspace in 2024 came to it from something else, and most of them still have that something else installed. If you want the wider field rather than a like-for-like replacement, start with our roundup of the best dating sims in 2026.
Frequently Asked Questions
TL;DR
Love and Deepspace's July 2026 collapse — a cancelled sixth love interest, a purchase boycott, and a 73 percent revenue drop — has a lot of players looking elsewhere. Pick your replacement by what you liked: Tears of Themis or Mr Love: Queen's Choice for the live-service card loop, Mystic Messenger for the texting, and premium Switch and Steam otome like Collar x Malice, Bustafellows, Jack Jeanne or even if TEMPEST if you want the genre without a gacha attached. If the anime art was never the draw, that is a genuinely different list.