First Impressions: Gaydorado

Gaydorado is a RPG/dress-up game I found while doing my daily ritual of skimming through the new offerings in the game section of Google Play. If you’re not sure what constitutes an RPG/dress-up game, you aren’t alone. Going in, my expectations were that it’d be little more than a dress-up game. I couldn’t see how RPG elements would fit into the equation so, I disregarded it. It wouldn’t be the first time a game was categorized incorrectly on Google Play. But the premise of a dress-up game centering gay men was still enough to buy my attention.


Gaydorado’s first couple of minutes are rather innocuous. You take your pick from a few character models and skin colors, name your character, and pick their birth sign. But maybe three minutes in, the game prompted me to choose a character class and state whether Ritz, my fancy boy, was a top, bottom, or vers. He’s vers, by the way, and a Taurus because, we’re the best. Then the game crashed. Typically this would be where I’d shelve the game because it had proved unstable, but I was hooked. How in the hell were they going to incorporate all of those selections into the game?

After I was finished creating my gay alter-ego, I dug in. I skimmed through a comic book-styled cutscene and then I was thrust into combat? Yes, that’s right; this game about fancy gay boys dressing up is also a game with many of the conventions one might expect from a gachapon-style RPG. You of course, have your main character but then, you can go to the bar and “pick up” other guys to be in your party at random. From there you have a number of ways of strengthening them from leveling, raising star ratings, evolution (Yes, like Pokemon), and going on dates to build your relationship.  It’s surprisingly robust.

But, alongside that is an equally robust dress-up game. You obtain clothing of different kinds of categories and are given challenges that you must complete by dressing up in a certain style. For instance, a challenge could be to dress in a “Cool” style and there are specific clothes which have high “Cool” values so, regardless of how they look together, picking all of the “Cool” clothes is the best strategy to win. Did I mention the art is nice to look at?

I really love dress-up games and RPGs but, I had never imagined them together. I feel as though those genres would fight each other for dominance if one isn’t scaled back into a more minor role and nothing about Gaydorado changes my opinion on that. To get through the story Gaydorado bounces you between the two styles of game in a disharmonious sort of way. It shouldn’t work. But oddly enough, it does. Not because somehow it was a stroke of genius to combine these types of games but rather, because both kinds of games are fun and having my avatar beating people up in a pink feather boa is fun.

I like Gaydorado and I think more people should play it. I also think that Gaydorado is an extraordinarily instable game. So, if that annoys you a lot, just keep your eye out on this odd little gem.