Matsukai Mao Spends Six Hours on a Married-Life Chore Game and Swears Off Marriage

NIJISANJI — Matsukai Mao spent more than six hours on Woman Simulator, a game that looks like a newlywed romance and plays like a race through household chores under a controlling husband, and closed the stream by saying she never wants to marry again.

She opened in character, announcing that she had registered her marriage that day and promising a married woman’s daily vlog. The mood changed within minutes. When the on-screen wife walked to the house next door, her husband said he had called the police because she had gone missing, and Mao found a tracking device on the wife’s ankle. “I imagined such a happy married life,” she said, and she asked married viewers for advice.

“I really don’t want to get married ever again.” — Matsukai Mao, at the end of the stream

The game scores the wife’s day: laundry sorted by color, dishes, ironing, mopping, trash, watering the plants and a timed dinner, with the husband’s mood rising or falling by the point. When the total went negative the wife was “sent to Siberia,” and the first such game over came about 50 minutes in. Mao called it a prison-break game rather than a romance, said it demanded more multitasking than any game she had played, and groaned at having to iron socks. Water and power outages interrupted the cooking, and at one point she sent money in answer to a message that turned out to be a scam, which she said unlocked the worst Steam achievement she had ever earned.

As the days went on she found cash, bought plane tickets and reloaded her saves to try to get the wife out. In the closing hours she worked through several endings. In the ones she reached, the husband found the wife and took her home, and she said she was still looking for the happy ending. She then read through the list of endings she had not seen.

Mao wrapped up by telling viewers she would never marry again, and said she had thrown her diamond ring into the river at Dotonbori for anyone willing to dive for it. She pointed viewers to the game on Steam and said a collaboration stream was set for 8 p.m. the next day. Chat opened with congratulations on the “marriage” and ended with thanks. One viewer wrote that it had been helpful for planning their own.