I Spent 3 Hours Getting Colonel Sanders to Fall in Love With Me on KFC’s New Dating Video Game

Objective: Making Colonel Sanders fall in love with me. | GIF: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

To say it was finger-lickin’ good would be too crude

Here’s a sentence that might as well have been spat out by a random word generator outfitted exclusively for 2019: Today KFC released an anime-style dating simulator game starring a hot, silver-fox Colonel Sanders. The big surprise? It’s actually pretty good.

The game, dubbed “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator” and created by entertainment/advertising company Psyop for the fried-chicken brand, follows the player through a three-day culinary school adventure (a culinary school degree in three days… that’s how you know it’s a fantasy, am I right, folks?). As the main character, you want to earn your degree, support your best friend, and improve your culinary chops, but more than anything else, this is a dating game and the ultimate objective is to bag the svelte Kentucky-fried daddy that is the Colonel, looking just as suave as KFC’s CGI Instagram influencer version of the man.

KFC is no stranger to using video games as a vehicle for promotion: past stunts include a virtual reality nightmare of an employee training program and an 8-bit Atari-style game also starring the Colonel, but never has the approach been quite so… horny. Here are the highlights you can look forward to, should you, like me, choose to spend a couple hours trying to date the Hot Colonel in a fried-chicken-branded video game:

Choose Your Own Adventure

The game unfolds in ten parts, each of which involves some crucial decisions that could spell your untimely demise or otherwise bring the narrative to a regrettable halt. Yes, the stakes in this game of culinary school attractions are so high that your character might actually die, as mine did. Many times. These are just a few of the ways I inadvertently cut short my path to culinary fame and true love:

• Going towards the light in a fried-chicken-triggered, out-of-body state of rapture
• Separating a dog from his dog biscuit
• Not keeping my libido in check and making a move too soon (repeatedly…)

Not only that, but like in any dating sim, individual choices affect the object of affection’s feelings for the player, setting up an ending in which you may earn the hunky Colonel’s heart — or just a coupon to his restaurant.

Graphics

Sunlight filtering into a bedroom, an academy courtyard swirling with cherry blossoms, a cooking arena fit for Top Chef — the game is flush with such backgrounds, which frankly wouldn’t look out of place in highbrow shoujo anime like Ouran High School Host Club. The characters, too, are appropriately well rendered, blinking and pouting in a dynamic enough way to suggest some two-dimensional humanity. Not to mention, the food design actually looks appetizing.

Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

KFC’s menu items play a central role in the game’s storyline.

Dialogue

The dialogue trends toward cheesy, but with enough self-awareness that many of the lines can definitely be read as ironic. See, for example, the culinary school’s deliberate mouthful of a name: “University of Cooking School: Academy for Learning.” Yeah, Shakespeare could never.

Varied gameplay

Like most Choose Your Own Adventure games, this is fairly standard click ‘n’ go. But there are a few mini challenges to switch it up, including a timed quiz (which, turns out, you’re destined to lose no matter what) and a turn-based battle against something called a “spork monster.” It’s definitely not dynamic enough to hold a person’s attention for, say, the three hours I spent speed-clicking through every possible game for this article (not to mention my romantic future with the Colonel), but more than sufficient for the one or two playthroughs that a normal human being would undertake.

Side characters

There’s a whole host of characters present to flesh out the world building of this game: best friend Miriam, spectacles-wearing Professor Dog (a.k.a. Sprinkles), villainous Aashleigh and Van Van, small-statured boy Pop, sentient kitchen appliance Clank, the forgettable Student (yes, that’s his actual name), and, of course, the Colonel. One character gets thrown a flimsy bone of a secondary storyline — BFF Miriam has her own little love thread going on with the scant remaining eligible bachelors — while others remain a frustrating enigma. Is no one going to talk about the professor/dean/CEO talking dog??

Hot Colonel

Of course, all of these features pale in the (high-cheekboned, smooth-skinned) face of the star attraction: he of the fried-chicken empire, Colonel Harland Sanders. Although the game never strays into particularly sexual territory, there are plenty of opportunities to sensually gaze at the Colonel’s rakish smile,

Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

Hi, there.

perfectly trimmed goatee,

Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

How you doin’?

effortless side swoop of silver hair,

Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

One ticket to the gun show, please.

surprisingly jacked arms,

Screenshot: “I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator”

“What a HUNK!”

and even a hint of chest at one point, and just sigh. (Is it just me or did someone order their chicken extra spicy?) If the goal of the game is to objectify the man who gifted the world with eleven secret herbs and spices, then mission accomplished: now, an entire generation of gamers will grow up with the cursed knowledge that anime Colonel Sanders is finger lickin’ fine.

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