Have you ever thought about having a romantic or even sexual relationship with your everyday furniture? No, of course you haven’t — you’re normal. Probably. Clearly though, the team over at Sassy Chap Games aren’t normal at all, as their debut game Date Everything allows you to don a special pair of glasses called the Dateviators, giving you the ability to Directly Acknowledge a Thing’s Existence. Basically, it turns household items into super attractive people you can romance, befriend or even become enemies with.
Date Everything isn’t a dating simulator to be taken too seriously, as the whole game seemingly exists as an excuse for your favourite voice actors in the world, and Troy Baker, to just let loose and have fun in the booth. The writing is comical, though you might have your fill (and then some) of twee, meta-humour by the time the game is finished, but both the writing staff and voice actors involved give everything 110%, ensuring every conversation is entertaining.
The plot itself starts out in the realm of the unrealistic, as you own a pretty sizable house despite having a degree in customer service and starting a new job speaking to customers at Valdivian, the not-so-subtle Amazon allegory. Your first day at Valdivian starts great, until the CEO replaces your job with AI (too real, gang), but a mysterious stranger sends you a package containing the Dateviators, which are what allow you to perceive couches as cuties.
From there, the game plays out through the same structure. You wake up each day at 9, and have five chances per day to interact with a different object. You have a conversation, potentially go on a date or be sent on a quest to interact with other characters throughout the house, and repeat until the day ends. Go to bed, wake up, rinse and repeat until you’ve dated everyone and everything.
While a lot of the joy and humour in Date Everything comes from finding the objects in your home themselves, and seeing what weirdly attractive weirdo emerges in front of you, the range of dateables is actually pretty impressive. You’ve got your usual mix of objects you’d expect to find lying around your home, along with a few silly and lurid ones too for those feeling a bit naughty, but then Date Everything adds some dateables that are more esoteric in nature. Again, we won’t spoil some of the surprises, but they are surprising to say the least.
Even though Date Everything’s meant to be more for laughs than anything, that doesn’t mean that the characters, storylines or even subject matters are treated as a joke. The characterisation that Date Everything gives to items you’d encounter in your home everyday, and the implicit expectations we place on those items in how they’re acquired or what their purpose is, play into how they’re portrayed within the game’s world. It’s pretty deep for a game about using sunglasses to shag sofas, but there’s some genuinely good material in here across all 100 of the game’s relationships. Even if the objects themselves aren’t human, the emotions, worries and concerns you encounter are deeply human, ensuring the game never gets too weird.
The main issue Date Everything has is the sheer size of the game. 100 dateable characters, each with their own unique questline, fully voice acted conversations and three separate endings, along with an overarching story about the origin of the glasses and Valdivian as a whole, is pretty ambitious. Maybe it’s because reviewing a game tends to force you into binging it in longer sessions, but there comes a point where it starts to sag under its own weight. Every day is the same routine, albeit you’re talking to different characters, and the overarching story fizzles out for a good while as you’re trying to romance enough objects to reach the game’s end goal.
The addition of three different endings for each character is great, as it allows you the freedom to establish what you think is the best ending for everyone in relation to you. No matter the ending, you still get the same rewards, which is nice, though the hate/enemies ending would feel better if you had more control or agency, or if the characters reacted more to your blatant attempts to antagonise them. Some characters in this game are, by design, thoroughly detestable shitbags, and it’d just be nice to say “nah, I’m good” by the end of date one instead of choosing the antagonistic options only for them to still say “meet me again tomorrow”. I just said you suck and I hate you, why do you want to see me again?
A couple of flaws notwithstanding though, Date Everything is a bold and confident debut game from Sassy Chap, taking the tried and tested dating simulator genre and just having some fun with it. Come for the alluring amenities, stay for the hilarious, thought-provoking and genuinely interesting writing.
An Xbox Series key was provided by PR for the purposes of this review.
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