Over the last five years, I’ve played and reviewed all sorts of bizarre and baffling dating games. I suppose that must make me the Casanova of the team, and I’m happy to take that role and live out all the video game romcoms that come my way. In this half decade I’ve shacked up with hunky suitors, run away with the circus, and snuggled up to the acrobat, and even romanced my way out of hell, all from the comfort of my own home. Date Everything takes dating from home to a whole other level though, by making all the household items datable dreamboats.
In Date Everything you play as an employee of the faceless and morally dubious megacorp Valdivian, who loses their job almost immediately after being hired. Replaced by an AI chatbot, you are in employment limbo when you’re contacted by a mysterious person called TinFoilHat and sent an equally mysterious package. Inside is the top secret new Valvidian product, a pair of Dateviator glasses. In an effort to get back at the corporate overlords you’ll need to use these to date inanimate objects in your house, which is just as normal as it sounds.
After a brief tutorial from the glasses themselves (who are of course datable) you’re let loose into the sandbox house to chat up whoever you want, by choosing various conversation options. There are a hundred different items you can date, and they’re all fully voiced with sensational voice acting. To say the dateables are varied would be a hell of an understatement, with them ranging from the coat hanger broskis in your wardrobe to the sassy rubber duck next to the bath. All the objects have human forms with outfits based on the object they are, and the designs are absolutely sublime. Who knew a table could look so good?
The sexy objects in your Date Everything house are more than just pretty faces too, they also have larger than life personalities that made me laugh out loud more than once while playing. Curt and Rod (your curtains) are ridiculously sassy, because curtains are made for shade. There’s also the assistant to the mayor, who is your floor because she’s always getting walked all over. It’s just the right combination of clever and ridiculous to bring maximum joy throughout your romantic adventures, and I’m only scratching the surface here so I don’t spoil the best of puns.
Whereas pretty much every other dating game I can think of is a linear visual novel, Date Everything is entirely freeform. Each day you can chat to five different objects, and it’s entirely up to you who you spend your time with. You can wander around your house to look for everyday items that tickle your fancy, and then by holding down a trigger you’ll fire love beams at it to start an interaction. Although the 3D space that is your home doesn’t look particularly massive, it’s positively packed full of objects waiting to be wooed.
Although many of the objects you’ll be spending your time with are easy to spot, some are much trickier to locate. This is where your Roomer app comes in handy, which will track different hints you hear about dateables you haven’t yet met. Some of the dateables are particularly well hidden (even in the UI) so I took every helpful nudge I could get to find true washing machine love.
If romance and snuggles aren’t for you though, Date Everything has you covered. For every single datable in the game there are three endings to work towards, Love, Friendship, and Hatred. By being suitably flirty, friendly, or horrible you’ll unlock these, and doing so grants you stat points. These go into five different categories (Smarts, Poise, Empathy, Charm, Sass) which will grant extra conversation options when you level them up enough. It rarely felt like I desperately needed to be better in a stat to successfully make friends with a particular kitchen appliance, but the options you open up over time are often very entertaining.
I had an absolute hoot playing through Date Everything but it does have a couple of tiny flaws. As cool as the freedom you’re given to date whatever you want is, that lack of structure often led to me forgetting who I had already met. This is especially frustrating when objects want to see you at specific times, and you waste a dating opportunity by meeting them too early. It’s just so easy to just go wild and meet everyone, and I think I’d probably have enjoyed myself more if I’d been incentivised to stick with a smaller number of favourites early on.
There are also some dateables that waffle on a bit much too, and tell lengthy stories that are a little on the dull side. The game often tries to give you the option to ditch them when this happens, but I was always too worried about our relationship to do so and instead suffered through the boredom.
Date Everything is an outlandish take on the traditional dating game, with so many objects to fall in love with hiding within its walls. The writing is engaging and often laugh out loud funny, the variety of datable characters is fantastic and the voice acting is impeccable. Date Everything is an ambitious dating game that I’d even recommend to those who aren’t usually fans of the genre, because it’s simply unlike anything else.
