Date Everything! isn’t the dating sim it appears to be. Though the game’s cutesy art style and lighthearted premise indicate an unserious game that’s making yet another joke at the expense of the genre, Date Everything actually contains novel explorations of human relationships and sharp-as-shit political critique.
Date Everything (the title technically includes an exclamation point) is a game where you, with the help of special glasses called “dateviators,” can turn everyday household objects into potential romantic partners. Every in-game day you’re given five opportunities to find new and talk to already discovered characters called dateables. As you interact with them, the things you say and do influence their feelings for you. Winning a dateable’s love, hate, or friendship will also increase the level of one of your personality traits — smarts, poise, empathy, charm, and sass — which unlocks more advanced dialogue responses. Say the right thing, and Dorian (your door, voiced by Ben Starr) will be your best friend boosting your poise. Say the wrong thing and your toilet Jean-Loo Pissoir (Max Mittelman) will swear eternal enmity, boosting your sassiness.
Date Everything is your favorite voice actor’s favorite video game. The game is a veritable murderers’ row of video game voice actors. Neil Newbon, Ben Starr, Ray Chase, Debra Wilson, Felicia Day, Ashley Johnson, Ashly Burch, and more lend their voices to this project. To borrow a line from Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, everyone is here and they’re delivering high-quality performances more associated with Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 than Hatoful Boyfriend.
I love how you don’t have to dig through the credits to know who voices what, as each dateable is given a biography which includes their voice performer. This approach makes sense because Date Everything was created by them. Ray Chase (Noctis Lucis Caelum, Final Fantasy XV), Robbie Daymond (Tuxedo Mask!!), and Max Mittelman (Ryuji Sakamoto, Persona 5) founded Sassy Chap Games. Date Everything is the studio’s first title that’s found viral success mainly because it’s giving the dating sim community — one that’s been left to languish on jokey cast-offs and the odd Valentine’s Day-themed events — exactly what they want: their favorite performers having fun. Every performer in Date Everything is having the time of their lives and you can hear it in their performances. Upon meeting Curt (Davied Morales) and Rod (Jacquis Neal) — any guesses as to what they are — I was delighted by their shade-throwing shenanigans.
What those faves are saying is just as important as who’s saying it. The game’s dialogue is sharp and hilarious, stuffed with puns and clever wordplay — but make the right choices and it can veer into adult territory that doesn’t feel too corny or vulgar. I was giggling and kicking my feet flirting with my vacuum cleaner (Zeno Robinson) because of the suggestiveness of some of our conversations.
I’ve never been able to fully inhabit the self-insert characters I play in dating sims mainly because the dialogue options I choose and what I hear hardly ever reflect things I’d actually say or hear in real life. The biggest appeal of Date Everything is that it’s written in a way that closes some of the distance between me the person and me the character in the game. My vacuum cleaner had lines that would have legit worked on me.
Another trait that has me swiping right on Date Everything is how it’s constructed. Dateables run the gamut of ethnicities, sexualities, and body types. There’s a neat, built-in content warning feature that lets players know if talking to a particular dateable might bring up potentially triggering topics. Every line of dialogue is fully voiced and every new interaction with a dateable comes with a voiced description of the character, a boon for low-vision players.
The game also lets you know precisely the politics of its creators in incredibly rad and funny ways. Within seconds of starting the story, I was newly hired then promptly fired by the tech megacorporation that developed the dateviators because my job had been automated by AI. Throughout the game, I’ll get updates from the CEO, which are part hilarious interludes, part scathing criticisms of the video game industry. At one point, the CEO fired the company’s event planner in the same breath he praised her for running a successful event. During one message, the CEO was begging for the dateviators back — stolen in a moment of corporate sabotage — because they’ve promised the technology to the, and I friggin’ quote, “US government’s department of Overseas Violence.” A dig that could be aimed at any number of companies, including one very obvious one.
There’s a tendency in the dating sim community to get reflexively defensive against cutesy-looking dating sims, especially those developed in the West. While the genre is a staple with a storied history, typically these games are treated as a joke. I am frequently annoyed when a big game publisher announces it’s making one only for it to be a prank. Or if one is released, it’s often a short, unserious side project made for laughs. There’s nothing wrong with that (pigeon dating game Hatoful Boyfriend sends its regards), but it gets grating when virtually every release is done for the lolz.
Date Everything feels like it should be one of those pranks. But in the same way I didn’t realize how sexy a vacuum cleaner could be until I talked to him, you won’t know how serious and special Date Everything is until you try it.
Date Everything is out now on PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch.