Date Everything is a 2025 dating simulator where a pair of magic glasses let you transform stuff in your house into people, who you can date. Your toilet turns into the rapper Jean Loo, the shower’s a country singer called Johnny Wash, the table’s called Abel and Shelley’s a shelf. It’s glorious. It’s light and fun and silly, and sometimes sexy, but mostly it’s just sweet. It’s not really a dating simulator in the strictest sense: it’s a relationship simulator, where relationships can veer from romantic to platonic to overtly hostile. It’s also a conversation game, a voice acting showcase, a series of dialogue options wrapped up in a hidden object puzzle with a marathon effort of character design. It’s a really fascinating gameplay experience, built around the thematic tension between the design of the house and the design of the characters.

The plot, such as it is, has you play a work-from-home employee cast into labour limbo. You’re not given any work, but the company hasn’t fired you, so you’re waiting around until they find a way to get rid of you. In the meantime, magic glasses appear in the mail, and you start dating household appliances. There’s an obvious thematic contrast there: the experience of the game is about connection and intimacy – you spend all your time running around talking to people – but it’s set in the context of social isolation and alienated labour. You’re working but not able to work, at home but on the clock. You’re earning money doing nothing. You’re not in the office, so you don’t see anyone, and there’s no commute or other incidental human contact. That contrast is part of the game’s power. The sense of empty alienation is emphasised by the visual design of the house, which has a soft characterlessness. It’s all dull browns and tepid cream, and the harsh lights turn the walls a sort of stained smoker’s yellow. The floorboards, by contrast, are very bright and jaunty. They clash with the colour scheme of the rest of the house: it almost looks like Fortnite or Hello, Neighbour, something deliberately unrealistic, deliberately crude and oversimplified. Doorframes and windows are set at a jaunty angle, and everything looks like it has the surface texture of a balloon. While the basic graphical building blocks are present, detail is often scarce. The washing machine and drier have buttons with no labels, doors with no handles. Simple textures are splashed across the walls of entire rooms – wallpapers, tiles, paint – with no variation, no scuff marks, no textural interruption to give the sense of a lived, real space. It’s a soulless, cheap, cookie-cutter house, a virtual reflection of the corporate machine that dumped you there.

As you move around this sketch of a house, each new dateable appears as a shock of real joy. The character designs are inspired. There’s a sense of glee to discovering each new character – discovering what the developers have done with this object or that. There’s so much craft and thought in how each object is communicated through fashion and personality. There are often literal referents of the reimagined objects, but also creative reworkings to suggest aspects of the furniture at hand. For example, Dasha, the desk, has square shoulderpads that hold a miniature computer screen and desk lamp. These are literal referents, objects taken directly from the real-world (‘real-world’) desk in the house and transferred onto her clothes. At the same time, her physique and outfit also suggest ideas about what a desk is – what its qualities are. Dasha is muscled and sturdy. She’s a Russian strongwoman. Her square shoulderpads speak to strength, breadth – the structural integrity of the desk, its function of holding things up. She’s got broad shoulders, which a desk needs to hold all your stuff. Other visual markers of the desk are similarly reworked as accessories or detailing, as in the drawers that run down Dasha’s sleeves or the power cord made into a necklace. A panel of fabric is cut from across the bottom of her jacket, leaving only the edge, which accentuates her physique but also echoes the metal legs of the desk. There’s also – this is a small detail, but it’s really neat – they have a little circular hole cut near the lapel where the cables pass through, as if for cable management. I wrote something around Christmas complaining about customisation options in video games, where it feels like sometimes developers abandon the storytelling power of character design in favour of collectable outfits and silly hats. Date Everything has character design in spades. It’s dizzying. There are, in total, a hundred dateables in the game. You run around this fuckass house, and it’s an awful house, but every object you look at you think – man, what have they done with this one? It’s a game that makes you excited about discovery. You know where everything is but you don’t know what it’s going to become. There’s a promise of transformation, of some magical change, invigorating the house. You clump around an ugly virtual space knowing the mundane will transform into something gleeful and creative. That’s the power of the game. It’s a game about escape and imagination, about art as freedom from a sticky virtual world. Things are crap but they can’t stop art. That’s the message of Date Everything.

Despite the humble environment, Date Everything is also a surprisingly large game. As mentioned, there are a hundred dateables to discover, all with their own conversations, interactions with other dateables, and their different endings, and each character is fully voice acted. The cast is a who’s who of the industry – Felicia Day, Colleen Clinkenbeard (who plays Lilith in Borderlands), Matt Mercer from Critical Role, Emily Axford from Dimension 20, Erika Ishii from Ghost of Yotei – I keep thinking, hang on, is that – and it ALWAYS IS. Dasha is voiced by Courtenay Taylor, who played Jack in Mass Effect, Ada Wong in Resident Evil, she’s in Fallout, Knights of the Old Republic – they’ve got everyone. The voice acting adds a layer of humanity to the dateables. When your desk speaks, it’s with a real person’s voice. It’s humanising – and even familiar, if you know the voice actor. I’ve talked before, with the game Five Dates, about how the structure of the dating game changes how you interact with a game’s characters. In most games, you’re listening for things that are gameplay-relevant – information about health, clues, experience, some new quest. In dating simulators, the game is picking who you want to date, which means you’re listening to decide if you like the person you’re talking to. That dynamic creates a direct relationality that isn’t really present in most other video games. It’s made into a question – do you want to spend more time with this person? It’s a different dynamic to, say, some farmer in a fantasy RPG who gives you a quest to slay the goblins that have infested his pumpkin patch. That relationship is obviously a crude function of gameplay – the farmer fulfils the role of quest-giver, and you’re not meant to care much beyond that. The dating simulator gives gameplay consequence to how you feel about each individual character. Obviously there are problems with that premise (it’s sort of weird and objectifying to gamify a relationship and make a person into a trophy), but the strength of the dating simulator is that it gives inherent stakes to relationships that are often otherwise functionalist and thin. And, as with Five Dates, the human voice acting goes some way towards humanising the objects – people? – at hand.

That sort of blurring between people and objects – the personification of household appliances, the making-human of literal objects – is really how Date Everything comments on the dating sim itself. It knows that the genre is often objectifying, and so it has you date actual objects. It allows you to build relationships, undoing some of that objectification by making your fridge into a friend. In a sense, the human voice actors are part of a process of reverse-objectifying, of making human. All the appliances have their features and characteristics recast into human qualities – into clothes, physique, personality. They are transformed, made into people that you can get to know. Dehumanisation is the tool of corporations: they reduce you to labour and wages, jettison you in favour of a cheaper solution. Date Everything offers an alternate path, an intervention based in art and creativity, in our shared humanity. While your corporate overlords replace staff with AI chatbots, you explore the inverse – humanising the inhuman, getting to know your fridge. It’s silly and goofy, and exhaustingly inventive. It doesn’t ignore the problems of capitalism and objectification, but it sees a path past them. This is the way, it says. Go date the fridge.