Date Everything: Flirting With The Universe

Games have allowed us to Date Everything from Alien gunners to pigeons. Through video games, you can date while running an arcade or a café, or live out your single father fantasies. But what if that wasn’t enough? But what if you want to date 100 different household objects?

Well, you’ll be happy to hear you can, thanks to Date Everything (the clue is in the title, really). After being unceremoniously dumped from your new job, you receive a mysterious, unexplained package. Inside is a pair of AR-inspired glasses that cause pretty much anything you look at with them on to be brought alive (using one of five daily charges). From there, you can strike up a conversation, become friends, enemies, or even lovers. Whether that is something romantic, physical, or both. Even the glasses themselves can become a familiar face by the end of the game.

Conversation is Key to Date Everything

You’ll be able to speak to five per day, but it’s up to you which characters you summon. Then you’ll need to sleep before speaking to them a second time. A lot of effort clearly went into crafting 100 distinct characters and personalities. Both their visuals and how they’re written tend to take inspiration from the household object they represent. Although there are some surprises.

Turns out my bed is a sensual and warm woman that’s comfortable with physical intimacy. Not a surprising activity for a bed to be involved in, but a bit of a surprise for me when it got rather steamy. So, maybe not a game to play in front of the family. Although Date Everything doesn’t come across as exploitative, it has no lewd graphics. It doesn’t shy away from discussing sex, and with this number of dateable characters, you will find varied attitudes towards sex.

A Houseful of Suitors

Having so many characters does allow for a great variety, either physically or personality-wise; you’ll probably find someone for you. Although you’ll find they each have their own idea of what they want from a relationship.
Backing up the strong writing and characterisation is a stellar cast of voice actors.

If you’ve played a video game, watched anime, or watched TTRPG live streams, you’re going to recognise some voices and names. Luckily, you can look up each character Pokedex style, check if you’ve discovered them, your relationship status, and who the voice actor is. It’s also useful for checking your progress towards seeing every ending or conversation for each companion.

A Stellar Cast

Date Everything feels like the kind of game where the cast gets to cut loose and have a lot of fun with the roles. Ben Starr (Final Fantasy XV) plays every door in the game, and it’s a joy every time. Most of the cast of Critical Role put in an appearance. With Matthew Mercer naturally being the D20 who guides you through a mini RPG scenario.

As the days pass, the overarching plot will progress as your ex-boss gets more and more irate about what happened to their advanced prototype tech – some kind of glasses. I gave the individual stories for each character more focus than the overall plot, but I appreciate the structure and the added sense of progression.

Romancing the Funiture

There’s really something for everyone with the breadth of relationships and those to share them with. There will be some content that gets either too raunchy or traumatic for some players. There is an option to play in “content aware” mode. This will warn you if such content is about to appear, giving you the option to skip it. I did have a rare issue with some of the text being a little harder to read and an annoying audio bug, which has since been fixed.

It’s not so much a downside, but once you’ve spoken to a piece of furniture or two, the number of choices before you can be a bit overwhelming. That does come with the freedom to either try and discover all the dateable folk or focus on getting a handful of relationships to completion. The limit of five charges per day might feel like it holds you back, but it makes for a natural cut-off for putting the game down, although I did fall into the “just one more” day trap more than once.

Could you Date Everything?

Date Everything won’t give you the same depth as a dating game that focuses on a handful of suitors, but it’s a unique experience full of wholesome and humorous moments. It’ll take some dedication and patience to see everything the game has to offer. But it’s totally valid to just jump in, fall in love with your faves, and move on. It’s hard to recommend to anyone that’s not a fan of reading, visual novels, or dating games. But for anyone else, Date Everything is definitely worth a look.