I Love You, Colonel Sanders! Review

Taylor Rioux
Feb 25, 2025
4 min read

Updated: Mar 11

I am not going to be licking anyone's fingers

*This is an expanded review for the video game I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator, published on 03/11/2026. If you would like to see the original mini-review, you can check that out here.

I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator is a free-to-play comedy dating sim, made by Psyop, centered around forming a romantic relationship with famed KFC mascot Colonel Sanders (I do feel it is important to distinguish between the man you founded the company and whatever KFC has done with his bastardized likeness). Saying such a thing out loud does make me laugh, as it is a bit absurd, isn't it?

Visual novels are no strangers to goofy premises; popular titles such as Hatoful Boyfriend, a game where you date birds, and Monster Prom, where you woo various supernatural entities such as a vampire or gorgon, are reminders that even the most ludicrous of ideas can be endearing when done well. But I Love You, Colonel Sanders! is less a visual novel and more a marketing stunt.

Developer: Psyop

Publisher: KFC

Platform: Played on PC (Steam)

Availability: Released on September 24, 2019 for Windows PC and Mac.

When looking at this game, context matters quite a bit. During the late 2010s, KFC was on a bizarre kick of putting the Colonel in everything from VR games to romance novels. These, too, are fundamentally ads, and KFC is no stranger to featuring odd imagery or dialogue in their marketing — past or present. I would even say they’re masters of marketing, their brand becoming synonymous with the obtuse and wild swings they take in that department. In this sense, releasing a visual novel with anime/manga stylings does not seem too far afield of their normal marketing efforts.

Despite KFC taking the piss out of many different mediums and genres, the attempt at a visual novel in I Love You, Colonel Sanders! feels especially dismissive of the art it imitates.

As I have played more visual novels over the last few years, I’ve come to appreciate them more thoroughly. I’ve come to understand more intimately what they do well, what the genre's expectations and trappings are, and how the best ones succeed. Maybe that’s why this one feels so thoroughly offensive to my sensibilities — it’s kicking down an already underappreciated method of storytelling.

While most visual novels — even the more silly ones — showcase a level of sincerity in their subjects, often touching on themes of trauma, abuse, or real-life pressures, I Love You, Colonel Sanders! cares little for anything aside from showcasing its product line. The game offers only vague gestures toward character archetypes rather than real characters, and the player has the unenviable task of navigating the haphazard dialogue to attempt to build a relationship with the titular character — a relationship that never even fully materializes.

Some of this is forgivable under the expectation that this game is not serious. It is plainly a comedy game, so why would they need to offer any material of substance? Unfortunately, there is a distinct lack of humour, as well. Absolutely none of the jokes land, with the biggest laughs coming from the first reading of the title.

Psyop has appropriated a genre that it does not know to sell a different product, all at the expense of the people who make and play games in the visual novel style. While the genre remains most popular in Japan, it has been more widely adopted worldwide by indie developers and people who generally fall outside the representation in major studio games — namely POC and the LGBTQ+ community. Visual Novels, perhaps more than any other genre of video game, serve as the platform upon which these marginalized people share their experiences, their trauma, and their truth.

Aside from this, I Love You, Colonel Sanders! also apes the style of Japanese creatives, but does so poorly — an ugly pastiche of the art and cultures that make the space special. With its combined invocation of Japanese aesthetics and its total lack of sincerity, the game truly is an affront to the medium of video games and the visual novel genre, in general. I just can’t shake the feeling that this horrific, corporate, shambling product is fully content to wear the skin of the other without ever fully stopping to consider why it has done so, or whether it was a good idea to do so at all.

Verdict

I Love You, Colonel Sanders! A Finger Lickin’ Good Dating Simulator is a free-to-play comedy dating sim that does not contain any good jokes or any romance. With only vague gestures at character archetypes rather than real characters, this thing is an affront not only to dating sims but to video games in general.

AA large brown number 2 superimposed upon a video game controller.

I Love You, Colonel Sanders! Mini-Review

I Love You, Colonel Sanders! is a free-to-play comedy dating sim centered around the premise of forming a romantic relationship with famed KFC mascot Colonel Sanders. Unfortunately, they forgot to put in anything funny or romantic. The game contains only vague gestures at character archetypes rather than real characters, and the player has the unenviable task of navigating the haphazard dialogue to attempt a relationship with the titular character. The game has boldly chosen to go with a sort of pass/fail choice system, where you either flirt with the colonel or have to reload. This thing is an affront not only to dating sims, but video games in general.