Date Everything!

Is dating not really your thing? That's totally understandable, as it can be quite exhausting. Fortunately, you can now date from home in the quirky and crazy dating simulator Date Everything!

It all starts when you receive a package on your doorstep from a semi-creepy guy you met online, who goes by the name "tinfoilhat". Inside the package is a pair of "Dateviator" glasses. It later turns out that there is a reason why you received these mysterious glasses, but that's a slightly different story. These special glasses allow you to see a kind of alternative dimension in our world, where all the objects in your home, such as the dining table, the lamp in the living room and your bed, have a kind of personified version.

A few good examples might be that the front door of your house is called Front Dorian and is a big bouncer-type character, your mobile phone is called Phoenicia and is a talkative woman, while your toilet is a charismatic Frenchman named Jean-Loo Pissoir, and your bed is a warm, voluptuous woman, who is of course called Betty.

This is how your house is filled with things that come to life in the form of different characters when you wear these "Dateviator" glasses - in fact, there are exactly 100 different "dateables" in your house, which together have hours of recorded dialogue and are all beautifully designed. We will return to both of these aspects later.

Like so many others in this world, you are on an eternal quest for love, and you can actually start flirting and initiating relationships with these characters who live around your house. This means that you can date everything from your own bed (which you've been in bed with before, of course), your bathtub, your alarm clock, your piano, your hot boiler, your vacuum cleaner, your microwave, the cardboard boxes in your cupboard, your armchair, your attic, and... well, many, many other things - you can even date your nightmares.

All these personifications of things in your house have a story to tell. Among other things, you find out that your shower cubicle, Johnny Splash, is a kind of Elvis impersonator with big dreams, the magnifying glass Maggie is a kind of detective who investigates mysterious events in the house, and the washing machine Washford and the dryer Drysdale are enemies and don't talk to each other, which can be a bit stressful when they're on top of each other all day. There are lots of amusing stories like this in Date Everything!

All these stories are narrated with full dialogue, resulting in a script of over one million words and 70,000 recorded lines. The best part is that the voice actors do an excellent job. A lot of really solid talent has been brought in to voice the various characters, including names like Troy Baker, Laura Bailey, Matthew Mercer, and Steve Blum, all of whom have previously voiced a sea of TV series and games and have numerous nominations and awards to their credit. It's a really strong line-up of voice actors, and you can clearly hear that.

So far, so good - but now the challenges arise. Date Everything! has good humour, excellent voice acting, brilliant characters - but unfortunately, it all gets boring relatively quickly. The different characters and their stories are original, and their narratives are delivered with great conviction, but after talking to the first 30 dateables, I simply began to lose interest in them. Both in the characters and their stories - and I sometimes found myself wishing that the conversation would end soon. That's not a good sign in a game of this type.

I felt like I was missing something more than just walking around the house listening to one story after another and occasionally solving various tasks for the different characters, which typically involved talking to even more characters elsewhere in the house. You have to be very fond of good anecdotes and stories if you are to be entertained for several hours by walking around and talking to 100 different NPCs without anything else happening. And right there, I was somewhat challenged.

Date Everything! looks and sounds great. We've already mentioned the excellent voice actors, but the character design is also superb. The game's 100 different "dateables" are presented through beautiful illustrations, and their clothing and design are very creative. For example, the bar cabinet Beverly is equipped with beer glasses on her arms and has shot glasses as bracelets, and the toilet Jean-Loo Pissoir has a toilet seat around his neck and a plunger on his head. The game is said to contain more than 11,000 hand-drawn images, so some illustrators have been very busy here.

I actually wanted to like Date Everything!, because I am a fan of games that try something new and a little different. Unfortunately, Sassy Chap Games did not succeed here, because the good stories are overshadowed by boredom when you go from one room to another just to talk to another character in your house. You have to be more than usually fond of short stories and quirky characters to stay interested in Date Everything! for any length of time. The only thing that kept me going in the end (apart from having to review the game) was the feeling that "there must be more to it - I must have overlooked something". But there was never more.