Date Everything!

Date Everything! was provided by Team17 for review. Thank you!

Ever wanted to date your table? Perhaps your door has caught your eye a couple of times in the past? No? Well, I'm here to tell you that you're missing out! The concept of Date Everything! is right in the name, having been given some special glasses that bring everyday household objects to life, which, weirdly, all seem to be into you to varying degrees. That's the concept with this dating sim, and it's one wacky, good time.

After being hired (and subsequently fired) from Valdivian, a friendly corporation who likes AI probably a little too much, you are sent a strange pair of glasses known as the "Dateviators", what follows next is a crazy dating adventure as you get to know all kinds of objects in your household, whether that be the ceiling, the floor, your fridge, shelves, windows, doors, a box! You name it, you can date it!

Now this might sound ridiculous, but as it turns out, it works well. You aren't just making friends with and dating furniture; they get anthropomorphized, complete with name puns, such as Abel, who is a Table, and Florence, your Floor. Each of these characters is accompanied by great artwork, and they're all complete with voice acting, which helps bring them to life and enhance their personalities.

And because of the large variety of "dateables" available, you're very likely to find someone with whom you gel. You aren't restricted to just 4 or 5 characters, unlike many dating sims; there are 100 dateables for you to meet around the house and get to know. You can expect some twists in the narrative, due to the overarching plot focused on the Valdivian corporation that advances as each day passes, so it's not all about your normal dating habits.

The gameplay consists of days played in blocks of time. You have a limited number of uses for your glasses each day, so you have to choose who you want to interact with that day, before eventually hitting the bed (who is also a dateable character, surprise, surprise!).

While I first went into Date Everything! expecting a straight visual novel, it's rather a first-person game with Visual Novel elements. You can freely wander around your house and activate your glasses at any point to look for potential objects to interact with. Half of the game involves exploring and discovering new interactive objects. As I said, there are 100 dateables in the game, and it's down to you to find them all.

Once you do find an object to interact with, you can spend one of your action points for the day (as well as a chunk of time) to start a conversation and get to know them, either as a friend or as something more. The game does a pretty good job of letting you decide your relationship status with each character, making it clear you are/aren't interested in them, or if you don't even want to be friendly with them.

A lot of time will be spent on "quests" for your dateables, which mainly involve exploring and interacting with other characters, resolving disagreements between them, and getting to know them a bit better in the meantime. It sounds more tedious than it is.

Visually, Date Everything! keeps things pretty simple, the house is basic in its design, likely not to clutter the game with too many non-interactable objects. If you can see something in your house, you most likely can date it. That's not to say the game is bad-looking; when it's in the Visual Novel portions, the character art is quite nicely done, with various images per character to convey different emotions.

The best part of the game for me was probably the voices. They bring the characters to life. There's a huge list of Voice Actors who were a part of this project, with almost every character having a different voice actor, including Felicia Day, Ben Starr, Ashley Johnson, and more. They do a great job of it, too.

Perhaps the only two criticisms I would levy against Date Everything! is the fact that it is not always apparent who you will be talking to, and as your actions per day are limited, that can be frustrating, and the game can feel a tad grindy. Talking to a toilet roll is the same as talking to the toilet itself; for example, it is also like talking to the soap in the cupboard, or the bathroom or kitchen sink.

In your quest to discover all the dateables, you will almost certainly keep meeting the same character under different guises, and that can be a little frustrating at times, especially when you get locked into a conversation with a character you aren't particularly interested in.

As for the "grinding", the ultimate end of the game requires you to max all your stats (which you get from building relationships) and also finishing every quest for all characters. It's great that there's this amount of content, but it will take a very long time to reach that goal, and if you're bee-lining for that goal, the game could get tedious, especially if you aren't interested in some characters.

Date Everything! - Steam Deck Performance

Date Everything! is about as simple as it gets on the Steam Deck. There are no settings for you to adjust on the Steam Deck, as the developers appear to have disabled graphical options. You can use the SteamDeck=0 %command% launch option to get access to them, but I would leave them as they are. The game runs at 1280x800 by default and has good built-in controller support.

The default settings applied can drop to 60 on occasion, so I recommend limiting the game to 40 FPS in SteamOS, as some rooms tend to dip into the 40s. You can also apply a 7W TDP Limit. This ensures a pretty smooth gameplay experience and also preserves some battery life. There are some slight stutters at times, but they don't significantly affect this type of game.

The power draw is low, mostly holding around 9W-10W, and the temperatures remain around 55-60 °C. You can expect about 5 hours of battery life from a Steam Deck OLED and around 3.5 hours on an LCD. Fan noise stayed minimal for me.

Running at "Low" graphics with the launch option can allow you to run at 60 FPS, but you lose shadow and lighting quality, and in my opinion, it isn't worth it to play a dating simulator at 60 FPS instead of 40 FPS.

Accessibility:

Date Everything! doesn't have many accessibility options. All dialogue is both voiced and written in text on the screen, in a decent-sized font. You can also enable a content warning to be warned if a conversation you're about to have is going to discuss potentially sensitive topics, such as mental health, trauma, horror, or conversations of a more sexual nature, and have the option to skip these conversations without penalty.

Conclusion:

Date Everything! might be the new standard to which I would hold dating sims. I'm no expert on the genre, but I have played a few before, and the voice acting and variety of personalities available in Date Everything! just sets the bar a little higher than the rest of the crowd. There are a couple of minor irritations with the game, but they're relatively insignificant, and the overall quality of the game more than outweighs any negatives I found.

As for performance on Steam Deck, the text is legible, the frame rate is reasonably stable at 40 FPS, and the controls work great. There's no reason you can't enjoy Date Everything! on the Steam Deck as much as anywhere else.

Our review is based on the PC version of this game.

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