Independent fan guide. Details reflect the launch patch (v1.0.3) and cite official sources; if the game updates, in-game text always wins.
01Who M is
M is a coworker at Morton Corporation, a name in the messaging window, and the game's entire romance route. She has worked alongside you long enough to message you casually, and in six years of shared employment she has never once checked what species you are. That is the game's premise wearing its nicest mask. Nobody knows you are a worm, and the person about to ask you the most famous question in the script knows it least of all.
Her thread starts as ordinary office chat, on the same system everything uses: she messages, options appear, you pick one and type it out letter for letter. Then the questions stop being ordinary, and one of them is the reason players remember this game. Would you still love me if I was a worm? You, a worm, get asked that by a woman who does not know, and every option on the list is a lie you have been living for six years.
It is the best joke in a game full of good ones, and it is aimed directly at you, the player. The question is sweet, absurd, and quietly devastating all at once, and the game hands you dialogue options and lets you sit there deciding how a worm answers it. Take the moment. The typing can wait a second, because only her very first message ever carries a clock, and that clock is for an achievement, not for the plot.
02The romance thread in order
Here is the verified route, start to finish, as documented across launch playthroughs. Every beat arrives in the messaging window except two: the flower order, which is a phone call, and the date itself, which is a choice. Nothing we could verify suggests a beat is missable in a story-breaking way, but the middle of the thread has a real delivery window attached, so order matters more here than speed.
Two beats deserve special attention, and both are about timing. The first message carries the only real-time clock in the romance, and the flowers carry the only calendar. Everything else will wait for you, which makes this a rare game thread where the beginning is the stressful part and the ending is relaxed.
- Answer M's messages as they arrive; the very first one starts a one-minute clock for Wow, You're Desperate.
- Reach the worm question, Would you still love me if I was a worm, and pick your answer.
- Answer Are you seeing anyone? when she asks.
- Answer Do you like flowers? — the beat that opens the florist errand.
- Call Jamie Blossoms at 555-256-7766 from the desk phone and order the $20 bouquet.
- Wait out the 2 business days for the delivery.
- Make the date choice: a drive-in movie, or the soil.
- Collect the relationship: Would You Still Love Me?, the rainbow skin, and the butterfly screensaver.
03The beats, and what they unlock
The cheat sheet, beat by beat. Two rows pay on the spot: the first-minute reply and the birthday. Everything in between pays at the end, in one lump, which is very on brand for a company whose promotion famously comes with no raise. The middle column is all you actually do; the romance is mostly a logistics problem with feelings attached.
One reading note: unlocks means what the game verifiably hands you, not a score. The middle questions do not pay items. They pay the next question, which in a thread this short is the whole reward, and the only reason to track them at all is so you know exactly where you stand when the florist needs calling.
| Beat | What to do | What it unlocks |
|---|---|---|
| M's first message | Reply within one real-time minute | Wow, You're Desperate, held by 47.8% of players |
| Would you still love me if I was a worm? | Pick your answer, then type it exactly | The thread continues, and the game's best joke lands on you |
| Are you seeing anyone? | Answer her | Opens the flowers question |
| Do you like flowers? | Pick the answer that likes flowers | The Jamie Blossoms errand |
| The florist call | 555-256-7766 from the desk phone, $20 | Bouquet delivered in 2 business days |
| The date choice | Drive-in movie, or the soil | Would You Still Love Me? at 30.7%, rainbow skin, butterfly screensaver |
| M's birthday on the calendar | Wish her well on the day | Cash, same day |
04The flower logistics: $20 and two business days
The one genuinely logistical problem in the whole romance is a bouquet. After the flowers question, the route hands you an errand: call Jamie Blossoms, the florist, at 555-256-7766 from your desk phone. The bouquet costs 20 dollars. Delivery takes 2 business days. That is the entire mechanic, and also the entire difficulty, because the game's calendar does not pause for love.
Two business days is the number to respect. Say it early or the date waits: the next beat follows the delivery, not your enthusiasm, and an order placed late in the week is an order that arrives next week. Call the morning the flowers question comes up, cross the desk while the topic is warm, and let the delivery run in the background of your normal work. The phone guide covers the dialing. The romance only needs the timing.
Notice what the game is doing, because it is doing it on purpose. A 20-dollar purchase that takes two days of planning is the most realistic thing in a game about an unlicensed invertebrate analyst, and it is the route's real design: the date is easy, the foresight is the content. Every other system in this game rewards reading ahead, from Steve's voicemails to the wall calendar, and the romance quietly grades the same skill.
The call itself is its own small ritual. The number goes in through the keyboard, one keybash per digit, the same way spreadsheet values do, and the handset is human-sized while you are not, so the grab-and-wiggle rules from the movement guide apply to holding a conversation. Write 555-256-7766 down somewhere before you cross the desk. It is the one number in the game worth a real sticky note, and the phone guide will tell you the same thing.
05The date: drive-in movie or the soil
When the flowers have landed, the thread arrives at the fork: a drive-in movie, or the soil. Read those two options again slowly, because the game wrote them with a straight face. A drive-in movie is a normal human date, the kind a person pretending to be a person would pick. The soil is a pile of dirt, which is to say a five-star restaurant if you are a worm. The entire premise of the game, compressed into one menu.
Here is everything verified about how the choice plays out: both routes lead to the relationship. The achievement, the skin and the screensaver follow either way, and no source we could verify documents a better outcome for one option over the other. Pick the human answer, pick the worm answer, and the game meets you there. What the two dates actually look like on screen we will leave undescribed, because walking in cold is worth more than a paragraph of spoilers.
If you want a tiebreaker anyway, use tone. The drive-in is the disguise kept intact, a worm maintaining a cover story in public; the soil is the honest answer, and the game's whole heart lives in the gap between them. Neither is wrong. The only genuinely wrong move is stalling at the menu out of fear of picking wrong, because nothing documented locks.
06The payoff: achievement, skin, screensaver
The relationship lands three things at once. Would You Still Love Me? sits at 30.7% of players, a number that lands exactly beside Worm of Wall Street, the promotion achievement, also at 30.7%. As many worms fall in love as get promoted, and the overlap between those two groups is presumably enormous. Both are story accomplishments rather than grinds, which puts them above nearly everything optional in the game's statistics.
The rainbow skin is the visible trophy, and it belongs to the same family of claimables the smartphone hands out for achievements, so the collecting type should check the WormTok app once the relationship registers. The butterfly screensaver is the quieter prize: your giant monitor, the one you bash spreadsheets into all week, starts drifting butterflies. In a game where the desk is the entire world, a screensaver is home decoration, and it is genuinely nice decoration.
None of it changes the job. The market still ticks, Steve still calls, the interview still expects your employee ID and one-word answers. The romance pays in the currency the game actually deals in, which is jokes that turn out to have been sincere the whole time. The worm question was funny for one second, and then it was a real question about a real fake identity, and the payoff is the game admitting it meant it.
07M's birthday on the calendar
One romance beat never touches the messaging window. M's birthday is printed on the wall calendar as an orange event entry, the same color as market events and earnings calls, and wishing her well on the day pays actual cash. Real money, deposited, for remembering a coworker's birthday. It is the only romance the office approves of financially, and the only relationship move in the game with a same-day payout.
The routine implication: the wall calendar is part of the romance guide. You already check it for blue deadline tasks; orange is where birthdays live. No verified source documents what happens if you forget, or what the payout totals, only that wishing her well pays, so take the free money and skip the guilt mathematics. The walk past the calendar costs nothing either way.
It is a small thing, and it tells you how the thread is built. Everything about M rewards paying attention a little earlier than required: answer her first message fast, order the flowers early, read the orange entries on the wall. The game keeps testing the same skill it tests at work, planning ahead, and it keeps paying you for it in three currencies: achievements, cash, and butterflies.
08The romance and the work week
The thread runs in the background of a normal week, and that is the correct way to play it. Her questions arrive between spreadsheets. The delivery takes two business days whether you stare at the monitor or not. The date happens when it happens. Nothing here demands you drop a deadline task, and the one moment with a clock on it, the first-minute reply, is over in sixty seconds. Rush the typing if you must, but never rush the thread.
Sequenced against the rest of the week, the romance barely competes for time. The flower call wants the phone free and twenty spare dollars, both morning problems. The delivery window wants you to have ordered early, which is the same lesson the blue calendar entries teach about deadlines. The date wants a decision and nothing else. Fit the beats into the shape of the day, gym before 10 a.m. and reading after 9 p.m., and love costs you no productivity, which is more than most office romances can claim.
Money is the other quiet consideration, and only briefly. You start the game with around 41 dollars to your name, so a 20-dollar bouquet is half your net worth on day one. By midweek, with task pay and the 200-dollar bonus for five spreadsheet files in 24 hours flowing, it is a rounding error next to the 3,000-dollar webcam the interview will demand. The romance is never expensive. It is just priced early, before your portfolio has opinions.
The one scheduling trap is starting too late. Begin the thread when it opens, because the two-business-day delivery is the longest wait in the route and everything after the flowers queues behind it. A worm who first admits to liking flowers on the last night of the week has bought a beautiful bouquet for the epilogue.
09What is not verified
This guide sticks to what launch playthroughs and community threads can actually confirm, so here is the honest border of the map. Nothing verified documents any further dates after the first, any branching romance paths, any breakup mechanic, or any moment where M learns what you are. If a fan wiki tells you the soil date unlocks a second girlfriend or the drive-in has three endings, that is content-farm fiction, and this game has attracted a remarkable amount of it since launch week.
Also unverified: whether the relationship changes the promotion interview, whether ignoring M has consequences beyond the thread stalling, and how much the birthday pays. We would rather leave those blank than guess, and the phone guide, the messages guide and the achievement index cover everything adjacent that is confirmed. What remains is still the thread worth playing twice: a woman asks a worm whether love survives a change of species, the worm types yes one careful letter at a time, and the office pays out a screensaver. That part, we can confirm.