| Quick Verdict: Date Everything! was fun until it wasn’t. It’s a really cute game with amazing voice actors and incredible art. I enjoyed getting to meet new characters, but it’s a bit hard to keep up with, and it’s hard to reverse damage you didn’t know you were doing. Plus, some of the characters put a hard line on friendship that you’re meant to push the boundaries of, which feels a little icky. |
| Game: | Date Everything! |
| Developer(s): | Sassy Chap Games |
| Publisher: | Team 17 |
| Review Score: | 7 |
| Cozy Score: | 8 |
| Price: | $29.99 |
| Pros: | The different characters have an absolutely insane amount of thought and detail put into them. The varied designs, voices, and personalities are easily the best part of this game. |
| Cons: | Ethically, I find some interactions to be concerning because you’re meant to date everything, but some characters make it clear they only want friendship. This felt like ignoring lines of consent. It’s easy to lock yourself out of a good ending because you basically have to be perfect with every different personality. Branches won’t let you know you’ve reached the end; they’ll just keep repeating and use up one of your interactions for the day. Some interactions require specific stats, but you’re not informed of that beforehand and will not get a chance to redo it or you need certain stats to repair a relationship, but you don’t get told how much. |
| Platforms: | PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Xbox |
| Genres: | Simulation |
Date Everything! is a dating sim that kind of plays a lot like a visual novel. You find yourself in the possession of technological glasses that allow you to see personifications of objects around your house. You can chat them up, learn more about them, and then become friends, enemies, or lovers.
You’ll get to talk to 5 objects per day before you have to go to bed and start all over. During this time, you can’t leave the house or the game will end. So, you’re kind of stuck in this Groundhog Day-esque world where you get up, talk to objects, go to bed, and repeat.
At first, things are pretty easy going and you get into the rhythm of having conversations. The designs of the characters, the different personalities, and the fully voiced-acted moments are all exceedingly charming. It keeps you excited to talk to more objects just to see more of the designs.
However, as you get to know people, you’ll start gravitating to the ones you liked the best. If you’re like me, you’ll end up getting into a cycle of talking to just those few that you’re trying to build a friendship or relationship with.
The characters are all extremely different, so some of the objects will put hard lines on only wanting friendship or falling in love from the first conversation. Others have to be wooed, but the way that you do that is through the right answers according to the personality.
Let me segue for a moment since I mentioned the object’s preferences. Wyndolyn is very, VERY clear right from the first conversation that she isn’t interested in romance and only wants to be friends. This is a hard boundary line that you are encouraged to violate due to the achievements of this game. One of the achievements requires you to get all of the objects to fall in love with you. Not only does that feel icky when it includes characters like Wyndolyn, but I don’t like that we have to basically coax objects to realign their thoughts.
She’s allowed to change her mind, but it still feels like dubious consent.
I’m sure it happens in what seems like a less problematic way, but the fact that we have to do it to get an achievement at all feels gross. I don’t even know how hard it is to get her to change her views because I haven’t tried after she set her boundary.
As for other objects, I had some people who hated me being nice and respectful and didn’t jive well with that, whereas others needed the gentle touch.
With 100 characters, it’s easy to make a few mistakes or to find objects you just don’t get on well with. It’s also incredibly easy to get frustrated. It starts to feel a bit tedious when it’s literally the same thing over and over again. It’s a lot of people and information to keep up with and some personalities are unforgiving.
My goal going into the game was to try and date all the objects, but I’ve been friendzoned for simply not knowing enough about food or not being bitchy enough. It’s a bit like whiplash trying to keep up.
I adore that there are different personalities; it makes sense that they respond to different things, but it’s a little frustrating that it’s nearly impossible to undo damage.
You also have to be mindful of when you’re speaking to someone. Objects like Holly tend to have the best response to morning conversations. So, if you try to talk to someone and they seem to brush you off, it’s best to either try one of their different objects or to try them at a different time.
Each object tends to have a few options if they’re more common objects like lightbulbs or chairs. However, some, like the water heater, seemingly only have one.
However, sometimes, you just get softlocked and you don’t realize it. I wish the game would let you know when there are no more branching avenues. For instance, Chairemi keeps telling me to come back later. I talked to her at three different points of the day and she says the same thing.
Something, anything, to let me know that I’m just wasting one of my interactions that day would be nice.
And Lux, I got to a point where he said he was busy, and every time I talked to him, I got the same ending. Since some characters respond to nastiness more positively, I eventually tried the more cutting response and got a hate relationship status. I think this might be inevitable because one of his challenges is to make him like you again, but even after he hated me, he still said the same lines.
Date Everything! is a delicate balance, and it’s fun, but it can get unfun pretty fast. Definitely don’t go into this if you don’t take rejection well because unless you’re the best conversational mirror in the world, you’re likely going to be pushed aside multiple times.
I’ll be honest, I got back-to-back rejected where Lux finally just hated me, and then I got a wrong answer on a food date with Mitchell where he friend-zoned me as a result. Personally, I was surprised by Mitchell because we had good interactions and no indication that I was doing anything wrong. I literally messed it up at one of the last questions and that’s all it took.
It’s frustrating not to know where the lines are that you have to play within and even more frustrating when you can’t undo them.
There are stats in this game that are achieved by positive interactions of friendship or love. You start at 0 for all of them and only get 5 or 10 points based on that character’s stat type — like charm or poise. These are important because there are certain interactions that require you to be at a certain level to utilize.
Unfortunately, when you learn that you need a certain threshold, you either have it or don’t. And, if you don’t, you don’t get a second chance. You have to know ahead of time that you need it.
Sorry, but this isn’t Groundhog Day and I won’t be repeating the same interactions.
There seems to be a lot of unspoken rules for Date Everything! and since the characters are all different, it’s not like you can just infer from one character to the next.
Add in the fact that you can only do 5 a day, and it feels like you’re kind of just spinning your wheels. I understand why you have to go to sleep because you can only talk to someone once a day, but it feels like a useless action. Once you get on a roll, you really want to keep talking.
Interspersed through the days, you’ll get texts on your phone from a job that you got hired and then fired for all in the same day at the beginning of the game. It’s an odd situation where you’re fired, but you’re not until they can find just cause. So, you don’t have to work, but you still have access to messages from the boss, your bestie, and a “mysterious” person who sent you the specs.
I don’t want to say that it feels disconnected, but when you’re flitting from one story to another without things being too interconnected, it can kind of bring you out of the groove.
I want to love Date Everything! and it started really strong, but the longer you play, the more you start to see the cracks. Some objects end up just saying the same thing over and over, so you’re stuck in a limbo with them until you ultimately decide to try other options in the hope that it gets you somewhere.
I don’t think that I would mind so much that you could say the wrong thing if you could fix it, but there’s only one instance I’ve seen where you could potentially mend it by getting up enough charisma and that’s a nebulous number that requires you to befriend or romance other objects.
Watch the trailer for Date Everything!
Date Everything! has a lot of effort put into it. I can see the care and attention to detail that was put in the voice acting, character design, and narrative design. Unfortunately, there seems to be very little harmony woven throughout the game. Sometimes you’ll get dialogue that has multiple people in it, but everything is fairly independent.
Overall, I wish it were more forgiving. There are achievements that you can get for having all characters at friendship level, hate level, and lover level. I simply can’t imagine replaying this game and going through the same dialogue and just choosing different options. Perhaps that’s someone’s cup of tea, but because these exist, I believe they were trying to force replayability more than trying to make it possible to do everything in one playthrough.
The premise and the idea are nice, I can see the gargantuan amount of work. There’s just something about getting further into the game that starts showing some cracks. Or makes it feel like cracks because the characters are outside of the flow of the rest of the house.
Add in the fact that you’re supposed to push what feels like boundaries of consent or be a bitch and it starts to feel less like a fun little game and more like you’re just trying to go to bone-town no matter the costs.
There’s playing the field and then there’s pushing boundaries…
I do appreciate the big names; hearing Felicia Day, Grey DeLisle, and Cherami Leigh made my little geek heart flutter. I grew up with Codex, The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy, and Sailor Venus has always been my favorite, so it’s definitely a big selling point just to interact with the voices you know and love.
For this reason, I think the $29.99 price tag is fair. It’s 100 characters with incredibly detailed designs brought to life by well-known voices. I’m kind of surprised it’s not more because I can’t imagine production was cheap. However, you have to be aware that the narrative is hard to control and work with all the varying personalities. So, you have to be the type of person who can just enjoy the ride and let it be what it is. Plus, you have to ignore the glaring consent issues; otherwise, you’re just plain uncomfortable.
If you’d like to try out Date Everything!, you can get it on Steam, PlayStation, Nintendo Switch, or Xbox for $29.99. If this isn’t your cup of tea, you can check out some of the other reviews I’ve done. Vending Dokan!: Kozy Kiosk is an idle game that lets you run your own vending machine business, and Idle Waters puts a fishing tanuki at the bottom of your screen, catching fish, treasures, and items for you.
