Lian'ai Zhujiaofan (恋爱猪脚饭) Review

I found out about Huang Xia because he was bumming around in Zhangzhuang, Zhengzhou — and our work unit was about to move there too. So I stumbled onto him by accident.

Then COVID hit, our unit’s plan fell through, and Huang Xia started walking across the country.

Some people call Huang Xia an idiot, a lazy bum, a piece of shit. I can’t confirm any of that. What I can confirm is that he’s not a dumb one. His videos are formulaic as hell, but there’s this weird absurdist artistry to them — the camera work, the content, the daily situation reports, all of it has a real sense of image. Huang Xia knows exactly what the audience wants, he films the stuff everyone loves to watch, and then when people start flaming him he plays the victim. And it’s not just him — all his “good homies” do the same. Zhang Gongmao and that whole crowd, same deal.

Lots of people say today’s youth are all about deconstruction, deconstruction. Nah. Huang Xia is the real postmodernist artist.

Especially since everyone used to dunk on Huang Xia for being a loser every single day — until Liangzi of the Big Stomach Bag fame burst onto the scene, and suddenly everyone thought Huang Xia was actually not so bad.

Anyway, I’m getting off track. Back to the point. Last year a Chinese-made game launched a crowdfunding campaign called Love Pig Trotter Rice (恋爱猪脚饭). It’s about a down-and-out civil engineering kid, Huang Xia, who meets Chen Jiayi, a goddess-tier construction worker who loves pig trotter rice, and starts his construction-site comeback story. The title is stuffed with “civil engineering bro” memes, and as a representative postmodern abstract work it drew a ton of attention the moment the crowdfunding opened — even hit some serious trending numbers. Most people were just there for the laughs and didn’t expect much.

Then it came out that the game was full of AI content, that the whole thing was slapped together, that the dev team had gone missing and run off with the money. It became a whole thing.

When I saw that I was kind of baffled. Like — anyone who looked at the game’s description and screenshots, did you seriously think the dev team was planning to make something legit? 99% chance it’s a shitpost. The heroine’s art style screams AI-generated — don’t tell me the team had the budget to hire Hasune. The story’s a short piece anyway; throw in some memes and antics and that’s about it. If they’d added a few landmine choices so streamers could get some good reactions, even better. That would’ve already exceeded expectations.

Then the dev team came back. Then the game launched. Then I saw it in the winter sale for an absurdly low price, and as a grandmaster of the Galgame shit-eating discipline, I naturally had to give it a try.

The game is very short. Or rather, by the time I finished it, I felt like I’d seen something, and also like I hadn’t seen anything, and also like I’d seen nothing at all.

All I remember is the protagonist is named Huang Xia, he works at a construction site, he runs into a rich girl who throws herself at him… and then I think he had a meal with Little Hat… and then I don’t remember anything else.

I have to say, the only thing I was looking forward to in this game was the dialogue throwing in some antics. I had zero expectations for the characters or depth — I just wanted to see more of the formulaic Huang Xia roast content in there.

But none of that was there. If anything, the whole game is less interesting than Huang Xia’s videos. The dialogue, the scenes, the memes — none of it landed. I honestly don’t think they even know how to do memes. Even Huang Xia is just shamelessly piggybacking on trends — when you think of construction-site misery, you should be thinking of Damengzi, not Huang Xia!

The writing reads like a middle schooler’s assembly line. That basically sentences the game to death. Reading it feels like handing in an essay to a teacher who gives you a pity grade for effort. You don’t know what they were trying to say, you don’t know what they were even trying to do. You used AI for the art, the characters, the music, the voice acting has zero emotion — could you at least make the script funny and entertaining? What was the point of this game then?

Is there actually someone out there hoping to find pure love through this game? That’s like making “The Big Stomach Bag of Renqiu: A Love Story.” Who’s here for pure love? Everyone’s here for the laughs. You don’t even have laughs — isn’t this game just dead on arrival?

So Love Pig Trotter Rice is just an awkward piece of work. Even if it costs a few bucks, the content is plain boring, there are no achievements, and playing it just feels like wasting time. It claims to parody Huang Xia, but the entertainment value is worse than Huang Xia’s own let’s-play of the game — and he sucked up all the traffic from it. The fact that it got completely turned upside down is pure dev team incompetence.

You could’ve written the protagonist bumming around, going to the internet cafe like it’s a job, cursing out the Blue Fist devs, then going home to absolutely inhale carbs at night — that would’ve been more interesting than this pile of diarrhea you call a plot.

Maybe the dev team’s last act of mercy toward me was that I finished the game in under two hours, so I could immediately request a refund. If you can actually sit through this game, this life is truly set.