Date Everything!
Review
Literally Everything
by JamesWorcester
reviewed on PC
Congratulations on Joining a Megacorporation
With your degree in customer service in hand, you are excited to start your first day at a new remote job with a faceless company. As stipulated in your employment contract, every day at Valdivian is a reason to celebrate, and after being welcomed into the family by the CEO, your manager Tom sends you a message complimenting your can-do attitude. It's about this time that you realise that yourself and each of your colleagues have a rating measured in stars underneath your profile pictures, and it's also about this time that you realise that the right hand side of your screen lists your 'Worker Perks Points', of which you have 10. For 1,000 worker perks points you can get yourself a pen, 5,000 for a mug, 8,000 for a keychain and if you manage to get 75,000 you can win retirement. Unfortunately (and realistically) as a remote worker, there is a note saying that these rewards are not available to you.
You finally manage to get into a chat with your friend Sam (the only real human in the company), before being informed that your department, like most departments these days, has been replaced by A.I. However, you can't be fired without cause, so they are now looking for cause. Welcome to the first day of the rest of modern life.
The Dateviators
All is not lost in your enforced isolation, as your office contains a few familiar books that we all have in our home offices these days, including 'The Self Love and Wellbeing Guide', 'My House was Abducted' and 'The Secret Life on Inanimate Objects', all of which are certainly not foreshadowing in the slightest. Nevertheless, the sticky notes you've stuck to your pinboard remind you of your ultimate aims in life: find love, get friends and... make enemies? You whip out your phone, and a hacker called tinfoilhat has started a conversation with you, and sent you a package, a pair of aviator shades with a loveheart above the nosepiece: the dateviators.
Out of nowhere, out pops a pink-haired stranger cutie, the animate manifestation of the glasses themselves: Skylar Specs. Skylar informs you that the dateviators allow you to 'Directly Acknowledge a Thing's Existence', or DATE the things in your house.
Yes, It's a Dating Sim
By hovering your cursor over an inanimate object and shooting love-hearts at it (yes, really), you can transform each object in your house into a hot and available hunka hunka, starting with Dorian the front door. Naturally, Dorian is a bouncer, who chastises you to not use your spectacles for anything untoward, believing in friendship above all else. With each of the 100+ "dateables", you can choose to pursue three main paths of Love, Friendship or Hate, and achieving each status allows your sass, smarts, poise, empathy and charm to go up on your personality chart.
The Dateables
Discovering each dateable adds them to your Date-A-Dex Pokedex, and allows you to continue getting to know them however you see fit; beginning with the stylish and sassy phone Phoenicia, Maggie the magnifying glass detective and even Betty your bed, who you've been sleeping with this whole time. Within a few minutes, I met the Elvis impersonator Johnny Splash (the shower) who wants to be a star and bemoans the mundanity of the bathroom, and then Lyric, the embodiment of books and literature who has sadly always been a reader, but never a writer.
Each character is very sincere and genuine, and they usually have a relatable sense of depth and humanness to them, with problems they're struggling with and their own goals and desires. Koa the couch is your lovable Hawaiian couch who just wants to pursue the idea of being 'alone together' and enjoying the moment without any expectations. Mac your computer is as wired in as they come and wants an operating system upgrade, which will unfortunately require you to delete 100 terabytes of your extremely embarrassing self-insert fanfic. Cam the garbage can is more standoffish, and initially only seems interested in eating your trash.
All of them are lovingly represented and created with gorgeous portraits and key-art reminiscent of Ace Attorney, with incredible costuming creativity to link them to the objects that they represent. Most conversations are quite casual and laid-back, the kind of conversations you would have with friends and loved ones in your house while being real.
Vibing
Date Everything feels very welcoming and comforting, from the visuals to the aesthetic soundtrack with unique themes for each character. The level of voice talent on display is arguably unheard of, and you will be hearing pretty much every voice you've heard in games and animation over the last 20 years, all of whom deliver impeccable performances. I found a lot of the messaging very affirming when it comes to dating and relationships, and with such a large and diverse cast of characters, you're bound to meet those that you like and those that you don't, just like I did.
Having said that, once I was a few hours in, I found that I was feeling a bit aimless. I'm used to conversations in most games being just a part of the game, so having those conversations and relationships really be the whole game felt a bit boring after a while, and some of the writing and conversation chains did feel like they were lacking in depth.
Final Thoughts
There's a lot of content here, particularly if you're interested in playing something fun, relaxing and not serious. I really appreciated the optional Content Aware option, where Skylar will come out and let the player know that the character they're interacting with might talk about sensitive subject matter that the player may not want to engage with. Date Everything is very self-aware, and if you're interested in voice acting or voice actors, then I think you're going to have a lovely time with it. For me personally, the gameplay loop did get a little old, and playing for anything more than an hour or two at a time was a bit draining.
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8.2
fun score
Pros
Sincere, genuine and welcoming, Fun, relaxing, easy-going, Great characterisations: voice-acting, key-art and soundtracks
Cons
A bit one-note, Unexciting gameplay loop, Relationships sometimes lack depth
