Doing your taxes is a nightmare, no matter where you live. It’s stressful in so many ways, it takes time away from your day when you could be playing video games, and it always costs you money. Today, a dating simulator of all things, Tax Haven 3000, has been doing the rounds because it claims it can make preparing your taxes feel like a romantic getaway.
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Tax Haven 3000 is a game that takes everything you usually associate with taxes and turns it on its head. It subtly helps you prepare for the 2022 US federal tax return while you think you’re getting to know a girl called Iris in an anime dating simulator. Iris is incredibly interested in your personal finances, and through your interactions with her, you’ll inadvertently prepare your tax return.
For example, one interaction sees Iris asking for your Social Security Number, while another asks you to input data from all your receipts so you can download it. As you progress, it looks like you’ll be able to access forms that have been completed or are mostly complete. Developer MSCHF Product Studios says it best on the game’s Steam page, “Tax Heaven 3000 is a dongle that adapts from a visual novel to the IRS.”
It’s hard to say exactly what the gameplay in Tax Haven 3000 will look like. There will almost certainly be dates with Iris that may or may not revolve around meetings in an office and potential romantic encounters. However, given the rather serious financial undertone of taxes in the title, we’d expect fewer raunchy scenes than you’d expect from a game like this.
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Tax Haven 3000 launches on April 4 for free, so we’ll have to wait until then to see how effective it is at helping you prepare for the 2022 US federal tax return—the interactions on the game’s Steam page show situations where you reveal personal finance details to Iris. In the real world, this might be a cause for alarm, but the framing of these encounters within an anime dating simulator seems to make them more palatable and less dangerous.
