Date Everything! The game that turns household items into objects of desire

Objectophilia – romantic attraction to inanimate objects – remains niche creative territory. But in the world of video games, esoteric dating simulations are having a moment. In Hatoful Boyfriend, for example, players court a roster of sensitive, brooding, high-achieving pigeons at an elite avian academy. Boyfriend Dungeon fuses the dating sim with the dungeon crawler, inviting players to fall for their weapons, each one a beautiful human form with damage stats and emotional needs. These games are both earnest and ironic, indulgent and self-aware: hallmarks of a genre that treats love not only as narrative pay-off, but also a space for playful exploration.

Date Everything! is the product of the genre’s natural evolution. After being replaced by an AI chatbot in your work-from-home customer service job, you receive a mysterious package in the mail: a pair of sunglasses that reveal the secret lives of the objects around your home, transforming roughly a hundred of them into dateable, anthropomorphised figures that have personalities befitting their function. Your front door becomes a gruff-voiced bouncer, discerning of who gets to come in. Your bed (“We’ve been sleeping together for years – it’d be a little weird if you didn’t know me!”) is a tactile confidant. Even the toilet has a romantic arc, embodied by a rapper named Lil’ Crapper.

Each day, you can initiate conversations with up to five of your newly sentient household items, all of whom come with dreams, ambitions and a surprising degree of emotional complexity. As your relationships develop, you help them pursue their goals. Some of these are practical – updating your computer’s operating system, for instance – while others veer into the fantastical, like coaching your melodramatic shower through auditions for the game’s version of American Idol. Your dialogue choices determine the outcome of each relationship, which can settle into one of three states: Love, Hate or Friendship.

The game is structured to encourage a kind of emotional promiscuity: as your connections deepen with various characters, you unlock social attributes that, in turn, open new conversational possibilities. You’re not so much looking for love as grinding for intimacy-based perks, though the game’s true pleasure lies in how deftly its writers match personality to object. Penelope, your forlorn collection of stationery, exudes the clipped charm of a yuppie-era secretary, sidelined by the shift to digital correspondence but convinced she’ll find an office fling.

Created by a trio of veteran voice actors – Ray Chase, best known for roles in major games, anime and Coke Zero adverts, among them –the game features a glittering voice cast, including Laura Bailey, who plays Abby in The Last of Us, and internet darling Felicia Day. These performances lend the game a vital charm, grounding its absurdities in emotional truth and elevating it from novelty to something unexpectedly affecting.

Date Everything! feels like a game born of lockdown – a time when social and romantic connection narrowed to a screen’s width. It’s also a sly satire of modern dating’s relentless abundance: a carousel of calibrated partners with whom you can explore your needs and chase emotional optimisation. And it asks a harder question: whether, in a system designed for choice, we can still make space for the compromises that commitment demands.

Photograph by Team17