Let’s face it, some household objects are inherently good looking. It’s not just the reflection of ourselves in our favorite mirror that can catch our eye. Perhaps the warm comfort of your bed, holding you gently before a good sleep. Other days perhaps it’s the steady hum of your central air as you let it cool you down from a hot summer day. Maybe you’re more attracted to your diary, listening to all of your inner thoughts like a perfect lover sworn to carry your burdens and rejoice in the good moments with you. Whether it’s your treadmill pushing you to your limit, the ebony and ivory keys ready to share a song with you, or the bathtub that washes away a long day, there’s an object of affection for everyone. 

Date Everything capitalizes on this premise and takes it to an entirely different level. That’s not to say that household objects aren’t sexy in their own right. No, it’s more to say, they can be even hotter when personified. Except maybe when it’s the erratic sink or nightmares that haunt you while you sleep.

How Our Romance Began…

Despite being sold as a sandbox dating sim, Date Everything does actually have a story. In fact, at its core, Date Everything has over 100 stories when you truly break it down by dateable. For now, let’s set the scene, if even just to make Chairemi, our chair, proud. 

Imagine it now, you have just started a job at Vadivian in customer service. However you are soon deemed redundant thanks to Val 9000, an artificial intelligence that will do your job from now on. Instead of looking forward to lots of video gaming, you receive a mysterious text message. Soon you’ll be receiving a package. How could you know that this package would change your life? Well, except that Skylar does tell you that your life is about to change. That is, once you can see her.

The dateviators open up a whole new world to you, one in which you can date everything in your household. No, it doesn’t necessarily mean you need to romance all of them, although it doesn’t hurt to try. This isn’t where the story ends though. We won’t ruin everything for you. Just know that you are finding yourself in a complex web of secrets, romance, spurned lovers, and maybe even a murder mystery waiting decades to be solved. 

While still being a bit vague, I will share that the larger story brings a deeper level to the game. One in which we ask, what does it mean to be human? What does it mean to feel? What does it mean to be realized? You’ll understand what realization means if you stick with the game. This deep dive is actually well done and enjoyable despite feeling as though it interrupts your dates just a bit.

Let’s Play A Love Game

The game play is fairly simple at the start. You’ll roam around your house with the glasses off when you want to interact with the world as normal. However, when you want to speak with the personified objects, you’ll want to toss on the dateviators (those rose tinted glasses) and find a object to speak with. You can only speak with 5 dateables a day, so choose wisely. You can also only speak to each item once a day. If they appear in someone else’s scene, this doesn’t count against their use for the day. So if you’re speaking with Amir and Johnny Splash appears, you can still speak to Johnny later.

From time to time you’ll also get text messages from the mysterious stranger who sent you the dateviators and your friend Sam who got you the job. You’ll also get notifications from work occasionally because while you’ve been made redundant you haven’t actually been fired yet. Interact with your text messages and your work notifications to continue progressing the overall story. 

Once you toss those glasses on, make sure you interact with the dateables. Will you be looking to romance them and see where it goes? Do you want to just find friendship with your favorite set of hangers? Or perhaps you know that yoga mat and those weights are just instruments of torture that you hate. The choice is yours. Whether you end as lovers, friends, or enemies, achieving a relationship ending with dateables provides you SPECS points. These will help unlock additional conversation choices with dateables and help move you towards realization with characters.

Don’t forget to take the dateviators on and off to interact with the normal world around you. Some objects will be hiding in closets, in cabinets, or under the rug. 

Why’d You Have To Go And Make Things So Complicated?

While the basic game mechanics don’t change, you’ll notice the narratives begin to expand. It’s no longer just getting them to fall for you. Depending on the dateable you speak with, you may find yourself on a journey with them. It’s not just about speaking with them. You may be chasing down rumors to get to the truth with Maggie the magnifying glass. Other times you will find yourself bringing a time capsule from the 1980’s up to speed with the comings and goings of their favorite celebrities. Dateables don’t always stay in one place so part of the fun will be finding them around the house. You also won’t always meet them all in the same place, so be mindful of the clues they give you.

If at any point, you don’t recall what they’ve said or where to go, you can always check your Date-a-dex to see what the next steps would be with them. If you aren’t sure where to find certain dateables, you can also check in with your phone, Phoenicia, to get some insight on where to find some more new friends.

Some dateables also will have varying lengths of stories. While the longest story can be skipped thanks to another friend, many of them will force you to go through many motions, especially if you want a good ending.

Dateables aren’t all easy to bond with either. In fact, some characters you’ll be interacting with anywhere up to five times just to even get a hate ending. No matter what ending you get with these dateables, you’ll still receive your five spec points for achieving an ending. At times, it will feel that the hate ending is the easiest to achieve, but it’s okay to play a little hard to get.

The Date-a-dex doesn’t only tell you more about the dateables, it will also tell you what spec points you’ll receive for getting an ending with that character. Game developers Sassy Chap Games aren’t the only ones who can be a bit sassy. As you earn your endings with different dateables, you’ll earn SPECS points. Those are personality points in Smarts, Poise, Empathy, Charm, and of course, Sass. To see which stat will increase based on your relationship, open up any character and check the two icons on their description. The top icon reminds you what item they are, while the second one relates to your SPECS points.

There Are Endings And Then There Are ENDINGS

Each dateable has an ending that you can achieve through game play. While their story line may seemingly end with finding out if you’ll be lovers or less, there’s more to the game in terms of ending. In fact, you could, if you choose to, end the game as early as you want. While I don’t recommend this, you could choose to ignore Skylar and the narrators warning and end the game as early as you’d like. Although, this game is brilliant so I’m not quite sure why you would do that. Unless your an achievement hunter, but then make sure you come on back.

Should you choose to end early, consider this something like the bad ending. The game will tell you as much too. The game will also sometimes railroad you away from making certain choices. This is to prevent you being soft locked in the game. This is extremely helpful for those who are chasing achievements or simply want to meet every character in the game.

Voice Acting and Music

It feels almost silly to review the voice acting on this game. The voice acting is second to none. Of course, that is to be expected from a game development company founded by voice actors. Everyone has brought their best to this, whether its in secret routes, seducing the player, or breaking your heart, the voice acting is fantastic. If you find your way to dating the developers, you’ll get to compare the voice acting to truly see how amazing it is. While I won’t tell you who is overlapped, a certain shower shares some overlap with items you’d find in a closet, and it’s shocking.

It’s more surprising when you get the opportunity to date the developers and hear them speak in their normal voices and then going back and speaking with their dateables. So when to comes to reviewing the voice acting, just know, you’re in for a real treat from everyone.

The music is another area that is quite impressive. There is music that covers just about every genre highlighting the variety of characters as well. When you choose to splurge on the DLC, you’ll get access to the four hours of music to hear all of the wonderful tracks created just for Date Everything. The music helps to set the stage for your interactions and matches the tone of where these interactions go. While you’ll probably hear some of the same music when you’re just floating around the house, you’ll quickly see how your interactions are that much more enjoyable due to the music.

Last Kiss (that is, in conclusion)

Fans of quirky dating sims are in for many times of romance. The game also has quite a bit of replay ability as you can go looking for many different endings with all 100+ characters. You’ll also find yourself spending lots of time trying to find everyone and go through their story lines. While some story lines are quickly resolved, there are also some scenes that are quite long. Thank goodness for a globe who knows the world must go on.

Credit to Sassy Chap Games for coming up with so much on their first game. Of course, yes, many of them have so much experience behind the microphone, the switch is quite smooth. The game delivers everything it promised and more. It truly is a labor of love and it shows. The team also made a point to ensure that during the date with developers, each team member has a chance to speak and get highlighted. The work given into even this moment, shows how important this was to everyone.

Fans of visual novels will find the immense joy in this game. If you are not a visual novel fan, yes, you may become quite bored fairly quickly. The game knows who its audience is and the audiences will appreciate the care given to Date Everything!

Date Everything was reviewed on PC via Steam. Gamer Social Club would like to thank Sassy Chap Games and Team 17 for the review code. Date Everything is releasing June 17, 2025 on Steam, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X|S, and Playstation 5.