Ghost Dating Simulation Season 1 K-Comic Review

At first, this sounds like a story we've all seen a thousand times before: a disillusioned young man tries his hand at being a gaming streamer, ends up getting pulled into a game, and is immediately surrounded by a bevy of lovely ladies. I went into Ghost Dating Simulation without many expectations, assuming it would be a schlocky webtoon about, well, hot ghost ladies near you. To a point, that's true – all of the ghosts protagonist Doyeon Choi has to help are, in fact, attractive young women. Or at least, they were. But when he meets them, they're bloody, dismembered, furious spirits of the unjustly dead, and he's their only hope for salvation…assuming he can solve their murders and help them to move on.

Part of what makes this work is that Doyeon isn't pulled into a game world in the same sense as many of his fellow protagonists. All he does is download a game his streamer friend/mentor, Sakje, sends him, hoping it'll make for some good content for his channel. But once he opens it, the game merges with his real life differently: he's not pulled into its world so much as it lets him see facets of the real world he couldn't see before. He discovers this when the game pings that he's about to start his first “date,” and he almost immediately sees a bloody woman lurching along the highway. This, it turns out, is Yeon, and she was murdered along this very stretch of road a few years ago. No one knows who killed her or has found her body, and that's what the game wants Doyeon to do: solve her murder so that she can move on.

To do this, Doyeon must behave in a way that feels almost foreign to the genre: he has to see Yeon (and later Si-eun and Hana) as people. If he's afraid of the ghosts and runs away, he dies, only to be brought back by the game mechanics at a “save point.” If he loses sight of helping them, he and they become corrupt, and he risks ending up like Sakje, who, for most of this first season (forty episodes), is MIA. Doyeon has to care about and for them, but he can't let himself or them forget that they're already dead. He finds both Yeon's and Si-eun's bodies. There's no coming back from that, even if he, as the “player,” can talk to and touch them. It's a dating sim that's not about capturing the targets so much as it's about learning to overcome the tropes to achieve a happy ending that isn't quite what that usually means.

Doyeon's kindness and humanity are part of what makes this series work. It's not hard to understand why the ghosts like him (romantically or otherwise), because he really puts in the effort to get to know them and help them. He's afraid of what will happen if he doesn't play the game “properly,” but as he gets to know them, he really does want to help. We see all of this play out with Yeon, who, for the first quarter of the season, is the only ghost he's working with. Doyeon and Yeon have to work together to figure out what they're supposed to do; at first he's terrified and she's just stunned that someone has finally seen her. Like any good romance, it's a process of getting to know each other, it's just that their story also involves finding her corpse and notifying the police without seeming too insanely suspicious – something that gets harder when he calls them again after he meets Si-eun and unearths her dismembered body. Doyeon is essentially trying to balance the game world with the real world while making sure that Yeon and Si-eun get justice, and if he were more selfish, it wouldn't work.

All three ghosts' stories are uniquely horrible and yet far too familiar. Hana's is the most immediate, because while she's still got unfinished business, it's not about locating her body; it's about protecting the younger brother she left behind. She's also the most suspicious of the ghosts, because Doyeon is her second “player”; her first encounter caused her to become a vengeful spirit before Doyeon managed to convince her that he would listen to her story and help. This puts her in a different place than Si-eun and Yeon, who both have feelings for Doyeon but have also largely worked out their own relationship in order to keep things moving forward smoothly.

Dong9's art does a good job of maintaining a balance between attractive and scary. Hana's vengeful spirit guise is horrifying, and Si-eun's first appearance is genuinely scary. Character designs are generic, but the plot largely makes up for that, and all of the ghosts have distinct personalities. The game notifications work because they're not constant, only popping up to make Doyeon's life difficult from time to time. As of the end of this season, we've seen “____'s Ending Unlocked” notifications appear, but without any indication of what that's going to mean for the story or the ghosts in question and what, precisely, Doyeon needs to do to achieve them.

Ghost Dating Simulation is, in all fairness, schlocky. But it's also compulsively readable and tries to use its genre to its advantage. It feels a bit like a combination of Higurashi: When They Cry and the K-drama Hotel del Luna, and while as of this writing it hasn't been collected into a book, it's worth reading on a screen even if that's not your usual thing.