Replaced by AI, you’ve been laid off from your job in customer service. It’s all you had. The job. Otherwise, you just have this house, your objects, and… a pair of high-tech glasses which animate every object in your home and allows you to converse with them.
With all this free time and a touch of agoraphobia, that leaves your days mostly free to talk to the objects around your house. You can befriend a bathtub, fall in love with a lamp, or create a rivalry with a treadmill, whatever your heart desires.
The game is both deceptively thin and polished with nuance. Each day, you can interact with only so many objects. So you take on preferences. Maybe you’re fulfilling one object’s needs by talking to another, but the gameplay loop is: engage items for dialogue trees, check the in-game Discord and your work chat, and go to bed. Wash, rinse, repeat.
What’s notable about Date Everything is just how much content has been crammed into this simple premise. There are 100 metaphorical characters to meet with three possible choice-based outcomes for each, resulting in 70,000 lines of recorded dialogue.
Date Everything is, above all else, really just a showpiece for good voiceacting. It’s super effective at that. The game is designed by a team who know the ins and outs of voice acting, with experience themselves, and so have tapped into an extensive Rolodex of many of the most reoccurring voice actors in popular videogames. You’ll get your Troy Bakers and Ashley Burchs and a cavalcade of other familiar voices. The performances are well-done and enthusiastic readings of some extremely off-kilter scripts.
There’s always an element of peculiarity with something like a dating sim and perhaps a sim about dating your couch pushes that over. The game does lean into its sexuality, but wisely also flags moments where it asks for consent before really getting spicy with its dialogue.
The dialogue choices are not too nuanced. Generally you can read the outcomes in them: they feel friendly, romantic, or challenging, and you can sort of game whatever path you want with a character. At the same time, misread some basic social cues and tones, and you will, at least a few times over, go down an unintended path.
As you explore the home in first-person and interface with all the inanimate-become-animated objects, what most sells the game is clean interface and UI design. Because it’s mostly compromised of text windows and looking at objects, the clarity of design is appreciated.
For a while, it’s all very amusing. It feels like an absurdity, one that could probably only be born from post-COVID realities, where so many people really had a new relationship and understanding with the concept of staying home. It’s going to be too far afield for so many people but if you have the grace and self-confidence to try something off the beaten path, Date Everything is full of amusing character-driven moments.
6/10
Reviewed on Steam Deck