Of course this would be the game that brings me out of hiatus…
What’s going on Buttonmashers?
Has COVID made you cringe at the thought of interacting with another flesh and bone person that you don’t know?
Does your current identity make it a little dangerous to leave your house/apartment/closet you can afford in this climate?
Do you want to Speed Date on a more intimate level in your…skivvies?
Then let me politely ask Katherine if I can use her to continue telling you about Date Everything.
Coming from the publishers at Team 17 and the strangely infinitely creative minds at Sassy Chap Games, Date Everything is a dating simulator.
Now, if this game was purely just a “dating simulator” at its core then I’d tell you and Palm-ela Hand-erson to enjoy yourself with whatever you like on your joy parts and have fun. But two things will happen. First, you won’t be able to do that too often, you need two hands to properly play the game. Second, you’ll miss out over 2/3rds of the game’s content, in my opinion. But let’s start from the top.
Date Everything starts off like most dating simulators where you lose your current job and absolutely have nothing better to do than to get yourself a harem (It’s wonderful when you don’t have to feed yourself in a dating sim). Given an object called the Dateviators (if you are queasy of puns, take some TUMS) by…someone, you are taken on a ride your Suspension of Disbelief will never forget. I’m going to do my best to be spoiler free as I write this review but the second hottest tutorial voice I’ve ever heard instructs you on what to do for you to Date Everything and realistically, beat the game. If you want to.
If that last sentence was a little peculiar, it was because that’s where this game branches off from most dating Sims. Most dating Sims, the goal is just to fill the relationship bar so that you can basically see whatever character naked. Now, this game has many – and I mean many – sexual elements to it but there is a much deeper narrative of who you are as a person in relation to other maybe conflicting personalities.
If you want to, you can just stand there and listen to the mirror praise you. You can stand there and listen to the door ramble on about keeping things sealed off. You could even have your cell phone just blab on to you about who knows what. Every single interaction in this game is voice acted beautifully with over 102 unique voices and characters. It would be easy for you to just get lost in the surface level.
Or…you could take an opportunity to relate to the existential dread that’s behind your eyes. You can figure out what the duck is going on with your rubber ducky. You can even coax out what is really going on with the hangers. Don’t let **anyone** tell you otherwise, it IS that deep.
This game uses a similar system of stats where the higher a particular stat is, the better options you have when interacting with a particular character. That’s typical dating SIM protocol. Where this game differs, is what it takes for you to get those points and realizing how many points you can get. I would like to note that while I purchased the DLC for this game (because of course I did for this game) under normal circumstances, the number of points that you get after completing a particular objective (no Spoilers) won’t get to 100 in a single playthrough. That’s another fork in the road where Date Everything is just on another level.
I wanted to find every single dateable. I wanted to get as close to 100% completion as I could on the first play through and I still couldn’t. But I wanted to, because the game had introduced so many deep and different personalities that I wanted to know how to interact with. It no longer just became about getting a love relationship or a hate relationship or even a friend relationship. While my overarching goal is towards a love relationship, it was fueled by the immersion the game had presented.
On the note of immersion, I do have to point out that at the time of writing this, the game does suffer from a common flaw of soft locks when it comes to so many different branching paths with all the different objects. It was noted in an interview that none of the dateables are joke characters. I can attest to that. Unfortunately, I have a save file that is soft locked with several of the objects.
Bugs and slight graphical errors aside, the artwork from every level is phenomenal. Getting the DLC was worth it knowing who was behind this video game. Every nationality, every age has been properly represented and if I haven’t said it once I will say it again representation matters. And I dated all 102.
I pride myself on my emotional intelligence as a gamer, and yes that is a very important stat. This game honestly flexed that muscle and made it stronger. I’m not asking for every dating SIM to have this level of complexity. But what I do want is an expansion of this where I’m either in a condo or something along those lines because as a voice actor I felt like I was in heaven. From the soft poppy theme when you meet your first dateable to the slight tones and shifts of each character’s individual sounds, the immersion is truly eyeball deep.
All in all, Date Everything is the perfect example of a team of emotionally secure and creative people successfully going Inception levels deep on a dating SIM. If absolutely nothing else, this game has something for everyone, especially the pansexuals. I’ve confirmed there are no pans, unfortunately.