Dating sims have let you date swords and pigeons and Colonel Sanders from KFC, but the dating sim-gularity had yet approached—only now we are arrived. Upcoming dating sim Date Everything will feature 100 fully-voiced household objects to romance, befriend, or even become enemies with. This is all thanks to a pair of magic glasses that let your character interact with the things in their home as if they were people.
Which will allow you to live out two fantasies at once: Home ownership and having a life partner.
I'm pretty jaded about videogames, folks, but please believe me when I say that I watched this trailer in awe, admiration, and more than a little fear.
"Date Everything brings an exciting new twist on the dating simulator genre. Your BFA in customer service unfortunately goes to waste as you lose your job to AI. But... a mysterious stranger sends a gift—magical glasses called 'dateviators'—which make your house come alive and dateable!" reads the description.
The trailer and screenshots alone show dozens of characters: A stylish Italian cupboard, a yeti refrigerator, a lovely piano named Keyes, a kind of sci-fi'd up vacuum cleaner, a feuding laundry basket and washing machine, a swole bookshelf lady—all talking, all characterful. It's clear that this will be more than anything an ode to the artful combination of character designer and voice actor in building a lot of personality from a spare few images and voice lines.
I'm not sure what to say. I'm gobsmacked. 100 dateable characters, all voiced, is a truly shocking number of weirdos to put in what is effectively a dating sim joke post. It's enough to have made it a game about an entire apartment building's worth of real people—which I guess would have taken more environmental modeling than this single house you can apparently walk around in first person. But still!
This game, though… It feels like some kind of dating sim Rubicon, a step into a world beyond dating sims, where so much power is bent toward the single end of dating everything that we enter a point of contracted possibility wherein the very concept of dating ceases to have meaning. If I saw a dating sim from 2034, would I even recognize it as such?
"Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,"
-William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming
You can find Date Everything on Steam, where it doesn't yet have a release date. It's developed by Sassy Chap Games and published by Team17.
