If we once thought that the highest – or lowest – point of romantic simulation had already been reached with Hatoful Boyfriend, the dating game set in the prestigious St. PigeonNation’s Institute where the lone human student could embark on a love story with biker pigeons and narcoleptic doves, it was only because Date Everything!, the latest title from Sassy Chap Games, hadn’t arrived yet. It might not be the winning “Game of the Year”, but this peculiar sim offers the chance to date something truly unique: any inanimate object, from your freezer to the elevator and, why not, even more abstract entities, like an anthropomorphized version of existential dread. “They say love is blind because it sees with the heart — which is why it shows up where you least expect it.”

Date Everything! presents itself as a visual novel that rejects the classic logics of dating sims, trading in conventional romance for a more contemporary narrative setup with a sharp aftertaste of social satire. The protagonist, a nameless avatar, is a customer service worker for the global megacorp Valdivian, who finds themselves suddenly replaced by artificial intelligence. Shortly after, a mysterious package arrives containing a pair of glasses called the Dateviator, designed to initiate a D.A.T.E. (Directly Acknowledge a Thing’s Existence) with their household items.

The gameplay revolves around a system of interactions that are as surreal as they are meticulously written, where everything around you — be it a coffee table, a toaster, or even the concept of time — can become a romantic interest, each with its own well-defined personality traits. All it takes is to put on the Dateviator glasses and look at the object of your affection to see it morph into an anthropomorphized character with dreams, opinions, anxieties, and, of course, communication issues.

With over 100 potential partners, 70,000 lines of dialogue, and more than 1.2 million words, the game constructs a sprawling conversational universe, where each relationship can branch toward multiple endings. The result is a deceptively simple gaming experience where 2D characters and minimalist 3D environments set the stage for a kind of absurd “ontological comedy”, often deeply emotionally affecting, thanks in part to the top-tier voice acting.

Dating games are now a widespread and well-established genre, increasingly distant in themes and tone from their Japanese ancestors of the 1980s. Over the past fifteen years, the genre has exploded internationally, especially through indie titles that have reinvented the very notion of dating simulators, embracing the absurd, the queer, and the meta. Love, in these contemporary games, is fluid, disorienting, and often comedic — as in Dream Daddy, which offers a queer take on fatherhood, or Boyfriend Dungeon, where the objects of desire are literal weapons with sharp edges. Date Everything! adds a new layer to this evolving landscape: a playful posthuman experience that caters to our inexhaustible human urge to connect even with things that have no eyes, no heart… but perhaps a programmable timer.

Opening image: Date Everything!, courtesy Stream