Love and Deepspace developers respond to players complaining that their dark-skinned custom characters are not visible in cutscenes

Love and Space has been out for nearly two years, but its player base is increasingly angry about an ongoing issue affecting players with dark-skinned custom protagonists: Their characters are effectively invisible.

If you're unfamiliar with Love and Deep Space, it's an otome game developed by Chinese studio Papergames and published globally by Infold Diary developer Infold Games. Love and Deepspace is unique in that it is a 3D otome game with action RPG elements, allowing players to form relationships with five different potential love interests while battling space monsters. But the romance element is the biggest draw, with visual novel segments and highly detailed, fully-animated cutscenes between the player character or the MC and their love interest presented as game rewards.

It has been almost two years since “Love and Deep Space” was launched in January 2024. It has also been a huge success during that time, with over 50 million players worldwide as of 2025. It won the Best Mobile Game award at this year's Gamescom and was praised for its positive tone towards women and their needs in relationships. Admittedly, “Love and Space” isn't a pioneer in diversity: the hosts only have one body type, and all of the available love interests are light-skinned. But the MC's look comes with a variety of customization options, including a variety of darker skin tones. This is a feature that historically hasn't been common in otome games, and it helps players with darker skin tones create MCs that they feel represent themselves in the romantic scenes presented in the game.

But since launch, players have been reporting lighting issues with the game that cause darker-skinned MCs to look oddly shadowed or occasionally become completely invisible during certain cutscenes. The complaints date back to the game's launch and are still being released this week, and they all look like this:

Thanks @Love_Deepspace Thanks to this new card for bringing matte to us dark skinned players 😒 pic.twitter.com/innx60E7et

—MadameSynclair (@MoonkissedMuse) October 11, 2025

That's, well, too bad! This issue is not consistent in every cutscene and varies based on skin tone, but the common factor is that players with darker skin tones on the MC never know if their character will be visible in the cutscene when a new update is released. Players experiencing this issue say they have reported it to Infold multiple times, and recently, IGN received a large number of tip email aliases submitted by players unhappy with the issue. So far, Infold has not said anything on the issue. But when IGN reached out for comment, Infold provided the following statement:

At Infold Games, we've always believed that our games are shaped with the players who love them. Community feedback, discussion, and creative enthusiasm are the driving force behind the continued development and vitality of Love and Deepspace.

We've seen these conversations happen and truly value everyone who takes the time to share their experiences and thoughts. Every comment, whether it's about visuals, storytelling or expression, helps us better understand how our work resonates across different perspectives and cultures.

At the heart of Love and Deep Space is a shared world filled with emotion and imagination. We hope to continue building hand in hand with our players, learning and progressing together.

Love and Deep Space players are understandably frustrated by this issue. After all, there are in the game The company clearly advocates Because of its extremely deep technical achievements, every detail of the characters seems real: hair, skin, clothes, everything. It would be one thing if this was a one-time issue with a card and resolved quickly. But two years on, and with absolutely no acknowledgment, dark-skinned gamers are tying the issue to longstanding issues of racism and colorism in gaming. They say that even if this wasn't intentionally malicious, it all goes back to the developers prioritizing making sure white skin tones looked good, while adding darker skin tones only as an afterthought, without paying attention to making sure they looked equally good. as A player named StarPop expressed this eloquently on Twitter back in May:

“Historically, dating games have been set up to be just light/pale mickeys, and black/brown gamers won't invest in playing the game because they can't see themselves. For us, we see someone else, or pretend to be someone we're not. Because of racism and colorism, pale skin is meant to be beautiful, while darker tones are meant to be dirty, disgusting, and unlovable because they don't fit in with beauty. Beauty Standard'. For dating games that don't recommend skin color changing, it's another way of telling us that we're not worthy of love or attention. For games that are supposed to represent you falling in love and being treated fairly because the person who loves you loves you, it excludes a lot of potential players, and when Love and Deep Space came out, it felt like the MC's skin color could change.”

Historically, the setting of dating games was just a fair/pale mic, and black/brown players wouldn't invest in playing the game because they couldn't see themselves. For us, we see someone else, or pretend to be someone we are not. Pale skin due to racism and colorism

— StarPop (@StarPop_Arts) May 20, 2025

“Not lighting us correctly basically tells us black/brown players that they don't care enough to light us consistently and correctly,” StarPop later wrote in the post. “When you implement different hues, just lighting on the default MC doesn't work because not everyone has the same skin tone.”

StarPop's post is just one person's experience, but it mirrors many other comments from non-white gamers and content creator Those who have pop up Over the past two years, we have been widespread on social media on Twitter, Reddit, Discord, YouTube, TikTok and other platforms. Unfortunately, many of the comments lately have begun to despair of a solution to this problem. While the community still encourages players to report issues to Infold during player surveys, there's no hope of any real change:

“I almost made a post about it, but realized it wasn't worth getting my or anyone else's hopes up,” one Reddit user wrote in reply to another post on the topic three days ago. “Not that people should give up on the campaign to fix it (it doesn't even make a dark-skinned MC look perfect, just visible), but given the complexity of lightning, and the fact that they didn't even bother to change the shade on the wound in Edge of the Continuum (my MC's “scratches” looked like she tried to apply the wrong foundation, there were only 5 skin color, bro, come on), I had to file another bug report because my MC looked like a shadow man and was just enjoying this card as much as I could.

“If by some miracle they actually fix this and it looks good, I'll give InFold every last item in my arsenal. All items, sent directly to their inbox.”

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter at IGN. You can find her posts at BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Have a story tip? Send it to [email protected].