Date Everything was one of those indie games that caught my attention from the get-go. With a premise so bizarre and absurd, I was absolutely sure this was going to go one of two ways. I would love everything about it, or I would not. Thankfully, I got my answer when I asked why in a game where I am encouraged to date everything, I couldn’t date the game itself, that’s how much it sucked me in. Hours later, the feeling had only grown. This could have been your standard Visual Novel, this could have been your standard dating sim, but there is a depth to every aspect of it that maintains that it is something so much more, not just embracing the idea of its name, but exploring the complexity of relationships and interacting in the process.
The player takes the role of an unseen character that simply gets to select from identities to represent themselves before going on an exploration of sexuality. At first, you have been hired for a remote job, you are promptly fired from (something that hit close to home for me, given that the same thing happened only a week prior), but this brief employment sets you on a path to have a pair of dateviator glasses sent to your house. A narrative is given for why you can’t really leave the house past this point, though, its deeper representation of player choice still allows you to do this. From here, you have free rein of your house to begin finding objects and dating everything.
While the game isn’t massive in scope, you still have a beautifully rendered house to explore at your leisure, with no limitations on where you go any given day within it, just that you don’t leave. There is a layer of creativity to the idea that anything, even the walls or floors, can be romanced, putting the player in the mindset of looking over every shelf full of random objects, or drawer full of junk, trying to find someone new. In addition, some characters like Wyndolyn, who represents the windows, or Dorian, who represents the doors, have multiple interaction points in the house that might drastically change the way they interact with you. There are also places in the house that aren’t readily apparent that you can discover through interaction with them, adding a sense of wonder as you explore. This sense of wonder is even more apparent as the time of day changes and the light streams through the windows, making the reality you find yourself in all the more georgous.
Characters take on the role of whatever you need to scan to find them, though they aren’t the actual ‘object’ themself, think of them more as a spirit tied to a concept. And on top of that, a talented VA portraying them. This includes Steve Blum as a table cowboy, Laura Bailey as your average laundry hamper in a toxic relationship with Johnny Yong Bosch as dirty laundry, Troy Baker as a viking treadmill, Ashley Johnson as a cardboard wearing adventurer, and Erika Iishi as… The bizarre representation of a martial aid purchased for you as a joke gift. There are so many great voice actors in a list too long to represent here, with every line of dialogue in the game spoken to the player, and there are a lot. Characters also often have their own theme songs that play during dialog with them, adding extra flair and depth when the bubbly beats come on.
Every character has their narrative, with the occasional overlapping of two or more characters participating in a scene together. All narratives can ultimately end in one of three results these being Love, Friends, or Hate. You are given pretty obvious choices that will send you down a given path, such as flirting with a character or rebuking their advances. Drink cart Beverly has an option to pour the drink she just worked hard mixing for you all over the floor, and I think we know where that leads. I mean, I don’t, Beverly is awesome, and I would never do that, but I can assume that’s an easy way to get her to hate you. What was surprising, though, was just how much freedom dialog has without locking you into a path, with multiple choices that can send the conversation in very different directions, but still allow you to ultimately say what you want to end up where you want.
The game itself can be long, with off-ramps if you don’t want to see it through to the end, completing every character’s personal story. Most of these personal stories, though, are pretty short, with only a few taking one or two interactions, while others take on average five. The game gives you five blocks of time per day, and only one interaction with a character per day. This was a function that annoyed me at first, but in honesty, I discovered its necessity later on. The game has a day-to-night cycle based on these blocks of time, with some characters putting emphasis on the day or time of the next interaction with them. While you will spend the early portion of the game scanning your TV, or your books, how bout the smoke alarm (you should absolutely scan the smoke alarm), by the last ten or so characters, you will be up against a brick wall trying to find them.
This is when very specific conditions come into play when finding new dateables, which can include time, as well as interactions with other objects in the world to trigger them. In the case of one character, I had to stand motionless, staring at a wall to make them appear. Date Everything doesn’t bill itself as a puzzle game over that of a dating game or visual novel, but it actually has some good ones mixed into it in the form of these late-game abstract encounters. The game additionally gives you hints and clues to help find characters, but these can honestly muddy the waters.
A character you have never met can interact with a character during your narrative with somebody else but there name, but the hint you get after just leaves them as a question mark. This is because, such as with Ben Starr’s character Dorian, it gives you a hint early on that took me all game to find the character associated with it, and the names are often puns on what they represent. In the case of this interaction, he actually did mention the character’s name in conversation, but you know, 10 hours of trying to date the things I could find made me forget. There is more than one hint you can get for characters, too, but they can be hard to find and often confusing. Another character is locked behind a door in the kitchen, and a hint I received indicated that what I thought was probably accurate. What I never got a hint for was the fact that another character’s narrative needed to be completed to unlock this door, which once you figure out the character, it makes sense, but this was the first point a narrative led to another in the game, so I had no idea to expect it. Additionally, that character I stared at the wall to unlock was such a twist on the formula, I spent a lot of time assuming the hint was simply guiding me to an obvious interaction.
The hint leading to that character was given to me by the globe, who, kinda in theme with being a globe, wanted me to introduce them to as many foreign characters as I could, which can all be done in one interaction had you found them all by then. While many narratives have a straight set of interactions, there are a lot like this that twist the formula and send you on tasks you will probably complete anyway, but hey, at least now you know you’re getting rewarded. In these quests, though, you do get characters who already dominate so little of the narrative but leave such lasting impacts to get fleshed out even more. In a game with one hundred characters that run the gamut from dommy mommy safe to a Haiku Writing tableware, the fact that I came away so invested in their narratives is a mystery of the modern age I can’t hope to explain, but a testimenbt to the writing present at every level of this game. The fact that so many of these objects brought resonance to my own feelings, becoming relatable characters with rewarding points of reference, wasn’t expected either, but welcome. Not since Night In The Woods did I feel a swell of emotion because it felt like a game was talking to me, looking into my soul like it could see me.
Upon completion of any given narrative, you are rewarded with stat points that only really come up in relation to the late game and special dialogue choices you can pick. These choices do not lock you out of the main narrative, but act similarly to Love Island: The Game’s choices, letting you into micro scenes within the scene. The issue is that you get rewarded with a very low amount of these, especially as these stats go up in quantities of usually five, you can be only a few scenes in before you start encountering options that require 40 or 50. There is an indication as to what characters yield what attribute, but never where you might encounter them, how much you might need, and which stat will matter. This can make you miss out on a lot of dialog bonuses until you are in the late game with twenty or thirty romances under your belt. The good thing, though, is that these are paid out no matter what path you choose to complete, meaning you do not need to change up how you want to interact with the world just to get these.
Verdict
Maybe, based on my own struggles recently, but Date Everything was positioned at the right place and the right time to affect me profusely. I like to think, though, that it’s just that flipping good. A cast of one hundred characters that all beg you to interact with them and see their narratives straight through to the end, and reflect on the lesson held within long after you have moved on to the next character. A small but inviting play area that rewards you for your curiosity as you explore every nook and cranny for discovery, of any kind, no matter how small it might be.
All of this was brought to life with one of the best voice casts possibly ever assembled to bring the outstanding writing on display to life. Seriously, when you assemble a voice cast this talented, and still they are outshone by the writing they were given to work with, you know you have something special. Date Everything didn’t live up to the hype it created, but it exceeded it in more ways than one, feeling like an evolution of everything that came before. It kind of makes you never want to leave the house again.
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Review For PlayStation 5, Also available for, Xbox Series S/X, Nintendo Switch, and Windows PC
A code was provided by Sassy Chap Games for the purposes of this review
Developer: Sassy Chap Games
Publisher: Team 17
Release Date: June 17th, 2025
PROS:
+ Outstanding writing
+Phenomenal Voice Cast
+Small but engaging house to explore
+Very Replayable
+Interesting Puzzles
CONS:
-Stats can be too slow to build
-Hints are sometimes unhelpful
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Date Everything
