34) Date Everything! (2025)

Beginning as a collaborative project between professional voice actors Ray Chase, Robbie Daymond, and Max Mittlemam in 2018, Date Everything! started with the simple concept of a video game in which players could date inanimate objects. Development would last for roughly four years before briefly stalling due to a lack of interest from publishers and, unsurprisingly, complications that arose from COVID. Finallly, in 2022, Team17 agreed to publish the game, which was originally slated for a February 14, 2025 release date before getting pushed back to June. The game is described as a sandbox dating sim, giving the players the freedom to explore at their own pace.

The story begins with our character, who has a degree in customer service, working from home for the totally not an analogue for any real world company, Valdivian. After a bit of customer service action, we learn that the company is switching to using AI, and is thus eliminating jobs that are now redundant. As we're still new and relatively low on the totem pole, our character is never actually fired, though they do have their role taken from them. At around this time, we receive a mysterious package in the mail, opening it to reveal a pair of "Dateviator" glasses, which, when donned, introduces herself to us and gives us the basic premise of the game. The glasses allow us to D.A.T.E. (Directly Acknowledge a Thing's Existence) the objects in our house. Through doing this, we can get to know the objects we live with, getting them to love, hate, or just be friends with us, and eventually allow us to "realize" them, a process that literally gives life to the objects in our home.

The premise, while patently ridiculous, relies heavily on a quite literal suspension of disbelief. The game is very aware of how absurd it is, and pokes fun at itself every chance it gets. The game features over one hundred characters for us to find, interact with, and either romance or antagonize. There are over 11,000 hand drawn assets, over 70,000 fully voiced lines of dialogue, and and every character has their own musical track in addition to a handful of surprisingly good songs that some of the characters sing. It'd be easy to assume that, with so much content, that there would obviously be only a handful of voice actors pulling double, triple, or even quadruple duty, but the vast majority of characters have a dedicated voice actor that only performs the one role. And these aren't just no-name actors, no, this is a veritable who's who of the voice acting world. We have Felicia Day, Matt Mercer, Dana Snyder, Johnny Yong Bosch, Steve Blum, Erica Lindbeck, Grey DeLisle, Laura Post, and Sailor Moon herself, Stephanie Sheh.

The game is mostly non-linear, allowing you the freedom to interact with which ever characters you want in pretty much any order you want. The writing runs the gambit from obvious puns and age old tropes, to more nuanced and at times tragic stories that hit close to home. The majority of our time is spent playing therapist to the characters living in our furniture, and while a lot of characters come off as one note, a few show a surprising amount of depth. My biggest issue with the writing would have to be the shotgun approach to comedy the game often takes, throwing so many jokes and references at the player that at least one or two are bound to land. That said, the times a joke does land, it can land pretty hard.

The writing and jokes, as well as a few of the harder to find dateables, extend beyond the obvious. One of the most obvious examples comes from the Date-a-Dex number for our... Let's say "adult toy" is 69, because of course it is. Other meta examples include Matt Mercer, well known for being the Dungeon Master for Critical Role, voicing a twenty sided die, our globe quoting an Animaniac's song, Stephanie Sheh voicing a character that is legally distinct from her more well known role, and many more. My favorite of these is the character of Dante, the personification of our fireplace. Obviously a reference to Dante's Inferno, he's voiced by Dante Basco, making the name a double joke, but Dante Basco also voiced Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender, giving yet another layer to the joke of voicing a fireplace. None of these jokes are necessarily the point of the characters, but they add fun layers of meta humor for those who get them.

In terms of gameplay, it's your basic visual novel style dating sim with the added caveat of every character having three relationship levels you can end up with. They can either love, hate, or just be friends with you, and you're free to stop interacting with the characters you don't like at any time. Hell, you can technically end the game whenever you choose to by simply leaving your house. There are multiple endings to the game based on how you play and how much time you invest. I will say that when I played, which was at launch, there were a few bugs still present in the game. Most were minor, but two of the characters were glitched to the point that I couldn't finish their quest lines. This wouldn't be a huge deal, except you do have to finish every character's story to fully realize every character in the game, which is one of the endings. Frustratingly, it was the ending I was working toward, meaning that even though I spent upwards of 50 hours with the game, I couldn't finish it the way I wanted due to glitches. These bugs have likely since been addressed, but it was still frustrating enough to warrant mentioning.

Ultimately, despite a few hang ups, I greatly enjoyed my time with Date Everything!. The writing, voice acting, and overall general presentation are top notch. The sheer amount of content is mind boggling, and I found myself genuinely invested in a number of the characters. The game is very open to all types of relationships and identities, allowing the player to choose to be non-binary and pursue relationships, romantic or otherwise, with any character or characters they choose. I also have to applaud the sheer diversity of the characters, not just in ethnicity, but in trans and non-binary representation, with voice actors that reflect this. Date Everything! is a love letter to the art of voice-acting, and despite some technical issues I experienced, is a fun and humorous addition to the genre.