Date Everything! Review (Switch eShop)

Date Everything! is a dating simulator where the dateable people are actually objects, or inanimates, that exist around your home.

You begin Date Everything at work, where you are a recent customer service hire at Valdivian, a major tech company. Almost as soon as your work day begins, you’re informed that your job is being made redundant by AI and that you won't be needed any longer. Then, you receive a mysterious package via a drone at your window: a pair of glasses, dubbed “dateviators”, that allow you to see your home in a whole new light, namely that it’s filled with attractive suitors otherwise known as your furniture.

Each in-game day, you are able to talk to five different inanimates. Through NPC conversations and quests that last anywhere from one to sometimes well over ten encounters, you can earn one of three endings: love, friendship, or hate.

Every ending nets you five SPECS (Smarts, Poise, Empathy, Charm, Sass) that unlock certain dialogue options and can eventually allow you to “realise” inanimates, turning them into fully fledged human beings that can embark on exciting lives in the real world. While you explore these new horizons, you also receive occasional updates from work, the mysterious figure who gifted you the dateviators, and your friend, Sam.

I'll note here that Date Everything's overall tone is pretty silly and not to be taken too seriously, but I still had a hard time buying into the foundational circumstances of the game. It seems like you are meant to be playing as a younger, recentish grad (with a BFA in Customer Service), but you also apparently own your own home featuring a large bedroom, a home office, a fitness room, a kitchen with a separate dining room, an attic with a safe that has literal cash in it, and even a piano. I was able to suspend my disbelief enough to go on a date with my dishware, but this was a stretch too far for me.

Speaking of dates, the name Date Everything is not an exaggeration. There are 100 NPCs that are fully voiced. Everything from furniture to substances like water and even your nightmares are generally quite willing to pursue romantic entanglements with you, the owner of the house.

A truly star-studded cast lends its considerable talents to the fully voiced dialogue and scenarios, bringing to life incredibly fun and creative character designs. The best part of the game for me was shooting little hearts at a new piece of furniture to see how Sassy Chap Games chose to depict things like a couch, a laundry hamper, or a furnace.

100 characters is an impressive amount, but it did lead to some interactions shining through more and left others feeling shallow and rushed. I particularly enjoyed the trope-y drama of Lux and Eddie, the house’s electrical box residents, as well as some of the stranger beings like Nightmare, Daemon, and xxXShadowl0rd420Xxx.

There are many times where multiple NPCs appear during dialogues or where I was sent to converse with one character in order to complete another’s questline. These moments really illustrated the interconnectedness and community of the house. However, there were times that a character would show up in these moments and seem to not know me even though we had previously met.

There were also some uncomfortable elements that felt underexplored. I was romantically involved with 59 inanimates, and the lack of reaction from any of them about my other flings felt a little out of place, especially since some of the characters express strong feelings about monogamy, polyamory, and cheating. It just felt like, in the context of these conversations, the characters' preferences should have played a stronger role in my relationship with them.

While there are a lot of potential triggers and uncomfortable scenarios, the game's content warning system is really thoughtful and effective. Whenever a potential trigger arises, Skylar—the inanimate d with the dateviators—pops up to offer to skip past interacting with the potentially triggering material. I appreciated the care that went into this particular system but would have loved a little more nuance in my actual relationships throughout the game.

I had some performance issues throughout that did significantly impact my play experience on the Nintendo Switch. I was often unable to interact with objects, like drawers or faucets, that I needed to use to progress the game. I would sometimes reload to find everything I had tried to interact with suddenly open. During dialogue, I experienced repeated scenes and chat options that didn’t apply to the actual conversation. Later in the game, I began to experience frequent full-blown crashes that required me to reload entirely. Luckily, Date Everything’s autosave runs pretty often.