Love and Deepspace has been out for almost two years now, but its playerbase is growing increasingly exasperated over a persistent issue impacting players with dark-skinned custom main characters: their characters are literally invisible.

If you’re unfamiliar with Love and Deepspace, it’s an otome game developed by Chinese studio Papergames and published globally by Infinity Nikki developer Infold Games. Love and Deepspace is unique in that it’s a 3D otome game with action RPG elements, where players can build relationships with five different potential love interests while also fighting off space monsters. But the romantic elements are the big draw, with visual novel segments and highly detailed, fully animated cutscenes between the player character, or MC, and their love interest, presented as gameplay rewards.

Love and Deepspace has now been out since January 2024, almost two years. It’s been wildly successful during that time, too, with over 50 million players worldwide as of 2025. It won Best Mobile Game at Gamescom this year, and has been praised for its positive tone toward women and their needs in relationships. Admittedly, Love and Deepspace isn’t exactly a pioneer on the diversity front: there’s only one body type available for the MC, and all the available love interests are light-skinned. But there are a variety of customization options for the MC’s looks, including multiple darker skin tones. It’s a feature which hasn’t historically been a common one in otome games, and which has helped players with darker skin create MCs that they feel represent them in the romantic scenarios the game presents.

But ever since its release, players have been reporting issues with the game’s lighting causing MCs with darker skin tones to look weirdly shadowed, or occasionally become totally invisible during certain cutscenes. The complaints go back to the launch of the game and are still being posted as recently as this week, and they all look something like this:

Thank you @Love_Deepspace for giving us darker skin players NO LIGHTING in this new card😒 pic.twitter.com/innx60E7et

— MadameSynclair (@MoonkissedMuse) October 11, 2025

That’s, uh, pretty bad! The issue isn’t consistent across every cutscene and varies depending on skin tone, but the common factor is that players whose MCs have darker skin tones never know, when a new update is released, if their characters will be visible in the cutscenes or not. Players experiencing this issue say they’ve reported it to Infold many times, and recently, IGN received a small flood of submissions to its tips email aliases from players upset about the issue. Until now, Infold hasn’t said anything about the issue at all. But when IGN reached out for comment, Infold provided the following statement:

At Infold Games, we’ve always believed that our games are shaped together with the players who love them. The community’s feedback, discussions, and creative passion are what keep Love and Deepspace evolving and alive.

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

Love and Deepspace is, at its heart, a shared world of emotion and imagination. We hope to keep building it hand in hand with our players, learning and improving together along the way.

Love and Deepspace players are understandably frustrated by this issue. After all, the game has explicitly been promoted by the company for its extremely in-depth technical achievements in getting every detail of the characters to feel real: hair, skin, clothing, everything. It would be one thing if this was a one-time issue with one card that was quickly fixed. But after two years and absolutely no acknowledgement, players with darker skin are linking the problem to long-time issues in games with racism and colorism. Even if it’s not intentionally malicious, they say, it all goes back to developers prioritizing making sure white skin tones look good, and only throwing in darker skin tones as an afterthought, without taking care to make sure they look just as nice. As one player, StarPop, put it eloquently on Twitter back in May:

“In history, dating games has been set where it was just a fair/pale Mc and black/brown players don’t invest in playing the game because they don’t see themselves. For us, we are seeing someone else or pretending to be someone we’re not. Because of racism and colorism, pale skin meant beauty as dark tones meant dirty, disgusting, unlovable just because they don’t ‘fit the beauty standard’. With dating games that doesn’t suggest skin tone variation, it’s another way of telling us that we aren’t worthy of love nor attention. For games that’s supposed to represent you falling in love and being treated fairly because the love interests love you for who you are, it excluded many potential players due to it. When Love and Deepspace came out, black/brown players got into it and it felt like heaven that the MCs skin tone can change.”

In history, dating games has been set where it was just a fair/pale Mc and black/brown players don’t invest in playing the game because they don’t see themselves. For us, we are seeing someone else or pretending to be someone we’re not. Because of racism and colorism, pale skin-

— StarPop (@StarPop_Arts) May 20, 2025

“Not properly lighting us basically tells us black/brown players that they don’t care enough to consistently and properly light us up,” wrote StarPop later in the thread. “Just doing lighting on a default mc when you implemented different tones doesn’t work because not everyone has the same skin tone.”

StarPop’s thread is just one person’s experience, but it reflects dozens of other comments from non-white players and content creators that have popped up across social media on Twitter, Reddit, Discord, YouTube, TikTok, and other platforms over the last two years. Unfortunately, many of the comments recently have begun despairing of there ever being a fix to this issue. Though the community is still encouraging players to report the issue to Infold during player surveys, it’s without any real hope of change:

“I almost made a post about this but realized it wasn’t worth getting my or anyone else’s hopes up,” wrote one Reddit user in a reply to another post on the subject from three days ago. “Not saying people should give up campaigning that they fix it (not even make dark skin MCs look perfect, just VISIBLE), but with the complexity of the lightning and the fact that they couldn’t even be bothered to change the shading on the injuries in Edge of Continuum (my MC’s “scratches” look like she tried to apply the wrong foundation, THERE ARE ONLY LIKE 5 SKIN COLORS BRO, COME ON), I’m resigning myself to having to submit another bug report that my MC looks like a shadow person and just enjoying the card as much as I can.

“And if by some miracle they actually addressed it and it looks decent, I will give InFold every last prop in my arsenal. All the props, straight to their inbox.”

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.