Befriendus

Description

What does it feel like to sit across from a dancestor who has no idea they’re destined to die in a war they haven’t started yet? That tension is the whole loop Befriendus is built around, and it’s a strange, quiet kind of game because of it. Instead of stakes and combat, Befriendus hands you conversations with the Alternian dancestors from Homestuck’s backstory, letting you get to know The Dolorosa, The Signless, The Psiioniic, Marquise Mindfang, and the rest of the alpha-timeline cast before canon ever caught up to them.

Reading Beforus Before It Breaks in Befriendus

The core of the game is dialogue, not puzzles or reflexes. Each dancestor has their own scenes, their own tone, and their own way of dodging or leaning into questions about what’s coming. The Grand Highblood plays completely differently at the table than The Handmaid does, and players who jump between routes without pacing themselves tend to burn out on the emotional weight faster than players who take one character at a time and let the dialogue breathe.

A detail that stands out on replay is how much the game leans on the gap between what these characters say and what a Homestuck reader already knows about their fates. The Redglare’s confidence reads differently once you remember what she’s headed toward, and that dramatic-irony layer is the actual engine of the game, more than any dialogue tree branching ever is.

Volumes: Befriendus ships as a set of separate downloadable volumes rather than one continuous build, and each volume adds a new slice of the dancestor cast rather than expanding existing routes, so players following the story in order need to track which volume introduces which character.

Fans of the source material tend to treat Befriendus less like a traditional game and more like an extension of Hiveswap Friendsim, and that comparison comes up constantly in community discussion — some players prefer Befriendus’s tighter focus on the dancestors specifically, while others miss Friendsim’s broader roster.

Questions Players Ask About Befriendus

1. Do you need to have read Homestuck to understand Befriendus? Not strictly, but most of the emotional weight comes from already knowing what happens to characters like The Signless and The Disciple, so newcomers tend to get less out of individual scenes than longtime readers do.
2. Is Befriendus connected to Hiveswap Friendsim? It’s an unofficial fan continuation built in the same spirit as Friendsim, focused specifically on the alpha-timeline dancestors rather than the full modern troll cast.
3. Can you unlock every dancestor in one playthrough? Content is spread across separate volumes, so seeing every character means working through more than one release rather than one single build.

Befriendus works because it never pretends the outcome is in doubt — you already know where The Summoner and The Psiioniic are headed, and the game’s real trick is making a single conversation with Marquise Mindfang feel worth having anyway.