I don’t normally play dating sims, but when Date Everything! came out last year I was very interested. From its insanely clever character designs to its top-tier roster of voice actors playing the personifications of inanimate objects around your house, it sounded weird enough that I would give it a go. I don’t play games on PC, so I had to wait for it to come to Xbox Game Pass, which it did only a few months ago.
At first, I was hooked.
I knew the game had incredibly good voice acting and next-level character art, but I had no idea how filled to the brim it was with puns. I lost count of how many times I groaned at the sheer absurdity of the wordplay, which to me is a sign of high-quality puns.
The characters were well-written, mature subject matters like trauma and intimacy were handled with great care, and it was full of my kind of humor. This game had it all for me!
Until it didn’t.
There are three “endings” you can get with the characters around your house; Love, Friends, and Hate. And for most of the game your choices for these endings are telegraphed so you know whether you’re going for something romantic, platonic, or confrontational. I had zero desire to make anyone Hate me, so I assumed I wouldn’t have to deal with those choices.
Until I started stumbling upon them, and that triggered very negative emotions within me.
At several points in my life, people I thought I was very close with have suddenly and without explanation, cut me out of their lives. Romantic breakups suck, but friendship breakups are equally devastating, and every time it has happened to me I was left with a deep scar in my heart. So when this started to happen in my leisurely video game time, my time with Date Everything! began to go sour.
It was the high quality of the voice acting that did it. Like I said, the voice cast of this game is gold-standard, so when these characters became suddenly and inexplicably mad at me, it was expressed with all the passion and emotion of a professional actor… and began to hit a little too close to home.
And so I uninstalled the game, which I absolutely needed to do for my mental health, but it still made me sad. I’d put a lot of time into that game and was really enjoying my time in that weird little universe.
Until I wasn’t any more.