Already a contender for weirdest game concept of the year, Date Everything! has caught a lot of attention with its premise: You can date anything, from inanimate objects laying around the kitchen or office tables, to the game logo, or, why not, the developers who made the game themselves. The game has been on Steam wishlists for years, but it first drew my attention this year, when a longtime friend and fellow tech journalist texted me out of the blue to ask if she should buy a copy. I then set out to answer that question for myself, but it would take me dozens of hours, hundreds of lines of dialogue, and meeting a massive cast of characters before I would arrive at the answer.
Date Everything! is a wild take on the usual dating simulation genre, promising players that they can literally date everything in the game. The premise is that you are stuck at home, gifted with a pair of glasses that can turn everything in your home into a date-able being. Until you date all of them and fulfill their wishes, you can’t leave. It’s incredibly novel and exciting in practice, when you can date anything from a light switch to a clothes hanger. But after I avidly played for several days, I realized that the latter half of the game is largely repetitive, and my progress was locked by the insane grind required to meet all of my date-ables’ needs. You have to do a lot of talking in this game to get to where you want to be, and every line is delightfully voiced by a star-studded cast. Yet if you lock in for the hours-long ride, Date Everything! can soon start to feel like a slog.
