“Mint chocolate tastes like toothpaste.”
Your date says it with a perfectly straight face. Later, after a horror movie, she offers another classic: maybe the real monsters are people. The internet has been recycling these lines for years, and here they are, on an actual date.
Welcome to Teakano: Teaka no Tsuita Koto Shika Iwanai Kanojo, a free Japanese visual novel about spending the day with Moka Kurishie, a girl whose conversation sounds like somebody opened an archive of overused online takes.
At the top of the screen sits a remarkable button: Go Home.
Most dating games invite you to say the right thing and keep a conversation going. This one says: you can leave whenever you want. An escape hatch on a first date is quite the feature.
Quitting is how you choose an ending
Released on September 17, 2026, the short game can be played in a browser. One run takes roughly ten minutes; seeing all the endings takes around half an hour.
The Go Home button is more than a shortcut to the main menu. The game has four chapters and five endings, with the outcome determined by when you decide to leave.
You can bail early, or stay a little longer. The usual branching-dialogue question—“Which answer will impress her?”—gets replaced by a much more awkward one: “How long am I willing to listen?”
In other words, the biggest decision in this romance is your departure time. The schedule has become the plot.
She's not trying to be funny
Here's the part that makes the joke more interesting: Moka isn't deliberately performing tired internet humor.
In the creator's own explanation, she means what she says. She's sincere. You're the one laughing, cringing, or mentally reaching for the exit.
Creator HIJIKI also describes a point beneath the comedy: don't let familiar online opinions replace your own experiences, and don't judge someone too quickly just because their words sound unoriginal.
That adds a second meaning to the big button. You have every right to leave. But leaving early also means deciding how much of the person you're willing to discover.
The smallest button carries the biggest question
The game doesn't need hours of exposition. A stale joke lands. You wince. The button is still there. Do you press it?
It's funny because a choice normally buried in a pause menu becomes the story's central mechanic. And it's surprisingly thoughtful because no one has promised that a quick judgment will tell you everything about the other person.
It's a dating game that lets you go home at any moment—and quietly asks what you might have missed by doing so.
No ending spoilers here. The game is free, with browser access on phones as well as computers.
Sources: HIJIKI's creator commentary (September 18, 2026) https://note.com/hijiki06/n/n60c7671933de ; official game listing https://booth.pm/en/items/8851322
