Date Everything! Is About As Weird As You Expect, But Even More So
What an idea.
Already a contender for weirdest game concept of the year, Date Everything! has caught a lot of attention with its premise: You can date anything, from inanimate objects laying around the kitchen or office tables, to the game logo, or, why not, the developers who made the game themselves. The game has been on Steam wishlists for years, but it first drew my attention this year, when a longtime friend and fellow tech journalist texted me out of the blue to ask if she should buy a copy. I then set out to answer that question for myself, but it would take me dozens of hours, hundreds of lines of dialogue, and meeting a massive cast of characters before I would arrive at the answer.
Date Everything! is a wild take on the usual dating simulation genre, promising players that they can literally date everything in the game. The premise is that you are stuck at home, gifted with a pair of glasses that can turn everything in your home into a date-able being. Until you date all of them and fulfill their wishes, you can’t leave. It’s incredibly novel and exciting in practice, when you can date anything from a light switch to a clothes hanger. But after I avidly played for several days, I realized that the latter half of the game is largely repetitive, and my progress was locked by the insane grind required to meet all of my date-ables’ needs. You have to do a lot of talking in this game to get to where you want to be, and every line is delightfully voiced by a star-studded cast. Yet if you lock in for the hours-long ride, Date Everything! can soon start to feel like a slog.
I’m looking at you, the sink, Sinclaire, and the dishwasher, Dishy.
Still, credit should go where it’s due — the voice actors are the stars of the game and are having an absolute field day within. You’ve got actors from Final Fantasy and other major video games reprising their roles satirically, there’s a candle called Jon Wick, and I happened upon cameos from all the game developers, some of whom got to voice themselves. There are tons of Shakespearean references, renditions, and yearnful monologues. The characters’ passionate line delivery, and fun repertoire of accents goes far, but by the thirtieth day of waking up in game to date more objects, I began to grow weary. Like other visual novels, Date Everything! is heavy on the dialogue, and light on most other kinds of gameplay. Giving a character the nice response pushes you closer to a “Love” relationship, while responding in a nasty way can get you closer to a “Hate” relationship. If you pay for the DLC, you get access to extra characters, Mikey Transaction (a pun on micro-transaction, and a fun bit, as there are no micro-transactions in the game), and Lucinda Lavish, who is probably the most risqué date-able.
The character design is another delightful highlight. The air fryer is a devout friar, which makes sense if you consider how avidly air fryer enthusiasts in your life may try to push the device onto you. The garbage, Cam, resembles a hipster man who crawled out of Brooklyn or Oakland. Some of the rest are just obvious name puns, like Bathsheba, your snobby bathtub that needs more friends, or Keith, your skeleton key who is also a gay lover.
Speaking of sexuality, I found a good percentage of the date-ables are male, while some are female, which could be an issue depending on your preferences. While you could theoretically opt out of dating any character, many are quick to blush or throw out a flirty line. So it’s likely that those who are open to dating all genders might have more fun with Date Everything! and it might not be the game for those aren’t.
A PC named Mac. Now that’s great fun.
When playing Date Everything! I found myself oscillating between relishing the stuff of English majors’ dreams, like the name-puns and Shakespearean monologues, and tediously scrolling through the dense dialogue, and meandering, self-indulgent soliloquies that are absolutely useless to the game’s progression. (I’m looking at you, Sinclaire, the sink, and Dishy, the dishwasher.) Some of the more long-winded characters felt like they were actively draining me of my energy, just like a real-life friend who can’t read the social cue to stop going on about irrelevant topics. I was playing this game to have fun, but the dialogue could veer from fun territory into borderline nauseatingly boring and somewhat exhausting. I didn’t wish that to be the case, because Date Everything! has such a strong start, characterization, writing, and incredible premise. But the middle to back half of this game just drags on, and to what end? The game’s conclusion is filled with long asides and plenty of jokes and self-indulgence, as well. I only wish the game could have been paced out better, and that the developers had been more aware of players’ thin patience for these extremely verbose characters. They could have made me care enough about the characters to want to sit through reams of dialogue rather than just forcing it on me from the start.
I tried really hard to love Date Everything!, but it wore me down by the end, which is a shame because there was so much to love from the start. Sometimes, I’ll occasionally open up the game again to visit a few characters, but that’s pretty much all I can muster up before everyone’s long-windedness and the repetitive nature of the dates run their course. So, to my friend who texted me, and anyone else who’s wondering: Date Everything! is a super fun novelty. But it will eventually wear off, and then you’re just stuck with a polyamorous group of inanimate objects who never shut up.
