Date Everything Is Peak Millennial Cringe

By Grace Benfell | July 10, 2025 | 2:00pm

Video Games Features date everything

Date Everything Is Peak Millennial Cringe

Generational differences are largely fake ideas. One need only read histories of youth moments of the past to see echoes of our current moment. The parallels between the anti-war movement during Vietnam and the ongoing student movement for Palestine are sometimes eerie. Nevertheless, media (social and otherwise) can heighten perceived differences. Date Everything represents this to me, a reflection of various traits I’ve seen attributed to millennials across my many years online. It is a cocktail of “lockdown era” loneliness, internetted selves, wholesome horniness (prudes will be happy to know there are no real sex scenes), and a toothless tech worker #resistance. All of this congeals into a heady and contradictory mix I am going to call “millennial cringe.” Lest you think I am holding myself above this, I’m a cringe millennial myself. I have some expertise on the topic.

First, and most obviously, Date Everything is fixated on a kind of pandemic loneliness. Forget Death Stranding; Date Everything is a real COVID game. Upon receiving the glasses which let you do the titular activity, you are stuck inside your house, lest the misguided corp which built them snatch the glasses back for use in its contract with “the department of overseas violence.” The glasses, like a PC or phone, open up a social world that would otherwise be inaccessible. When you aren’t chatting it up, Date Everything is lonely. You wander an empty house, with no human connection that isn’t mediated by a screen.

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Even in Date Everything’s jokester tone, this lonesome feeling could resonate. Date Everything feels targeted to those who pivoted to work-from-home during the early days of the pandemic. As that time’s absurdities and dreads still linger (and as the health care crisis COVID represents worsens), it could be worthwhile to revisit them even in a comic, pastel hue. But even beyond COVID, I believe we live in an age of general loneliness. Social media can connect us, but most often labels and itemizes us. The nomenclature of “essential worker” reveals how many jobs are unessential and provide no tangible benefit to any real human beings (except maybe shareholders). Real community takes real work and time, both things that precarity and circumstance rob from most of us. Even through all its joke characters, Date Everything is explicitly about the importance of real community. Its endgame involves bringing each of its characters to real, human life, letting them live free together.

But Date Everything does not address these issues so much as it walks around them. Every one of Date Everything’s characters (or “dateables” as the game calls them) is an island unto themselves. Though the game goes to great pains to turn its house into a little town, each one is activated on your whim. You mostly talk to them one at a time. Sometimes a false word or a poorly-solved puzzle will cause one to hate you, but there are no real frictions. No “dateable” will drift apart from you through no fault of your own. Few will judge you preemptively with anything but glowing admiration. Everything in the game has to be able to love and desire you. There are exceptions, but you would have to deliberately hurt most of the game’s characters to get a “hate” ending with them. The game sets you up as isolated (you start with one [1] non-object friend), but getting over that is as easy as wearing the right headgear and saying the right catchphrase. Nothing like scores of colorful mascot characters to get you out of your comfort zone.

But the game is almost nothing but a comfort zone. While many of the game’s storylines invite you to challenge the dateables, none of them can really challenge you. If you start off on the wrong foot with one, it’s most often because of something you did when you thought they were merely objects. In other words, these frictions either don’t resemble the ways people actually hurt each other or else they are played for laughs. The best romance stories involve people acting badly, hurting each other deeply, and still, through that hurt and not in spite of it, loving each other. Though you can get objects to hate you, there is no heartbreak in Date Everything.

Date Everything

I recently read, and would highly recommend, Charlotte Shane’s memoir An Honest Woman. In its final chapter, she describes her relationship with her husband and a time of frequent fights that is now over. She writes, “we hurt each other during that period, but neither of us did anything unforgivable, and maybe what we did doesn’t require forgiveness at all. It’s as if a person drowning, in a panic, accidentally struck someone trying to save them, and we were both the other’s victim and rescuer, and back on dry land, there is no animosity, just relief.” Real love is full of this kind of hurt. It is woven with difficulties that are no one’s fault or not easily reducible to obvious character flaws. It is difficult to capture in miniature, but by no means impossible.

For example, people often complain about the artificiality of the final conflict before resolution in rom-coms. I’ll not deny that they can be inelegant, but their purpose is to approximate those hurt feelings. Without the small-time frictions of a relationship that can take years to surface, it must rely on the short-term spat and draw out its scale. That feeling of tension and relief can be transcendent. However, even that reduction feels expansive and gregarious compared to Date Everything’s microstories.

That slightness brings us to Date Everything’s more explicit politics. One of the three human characters in Date Everything is a whistleblower. Determined to keep the “Datevators” out of the hands of the US military, he sends you, the lowest paid worker at Valdivian, the device for safe keeping. Date Everything‘s politics rely on uncontroversial platitudes (at least in relation to its target audience): capitalism bad, AI bad, war bad. Look, I don’t expect a game like this to have fierce principles, but it all feels cheap. Especially since, despite an active call for divestment from Microsoft for its complicity in genocide, Date Everything is available to purchase on Xbox platforms. This might seem disconnected from Date Everything’s frictionless romance, but I believe it comes from a similar place: A total avoidance of discomfort.

I understand that much of what I am complaining about is a feature, not a bug. There are many cringe millennials who enjoy exactly this kind of aesthetic. Not every game should challenge us or delve into the deepest parts of love. Date Everything has no real ambitions to do that. It is also limited by the number of characters it has to explore. Part of the game’s appeal is its scale; it is the thing that sets it apart. If I wanted a profound one-on-one romance, I could just play Final Fantasy X or Judy Álvarez’s missions in Cyberpunk 2077 or just read a damn book. And I’ll say this for Date Everything: it is earnest.

But, god, it’s all a little immature, isn’t it? A great rom-com, like the glowing Moonstruck or the shatteringly lonely The Apartment, can be as profound (and funny) as anything else. Perhaps others are content settling for cutesy shenanigans. But nothing about Date Everything is really new or novel. So many video games treat its characters as objects; I fail to see what being cheeky or meta about it adds. I want more, not just from video games as an abstract category, but from anything I spend my limited time doing. By skimming over the surface of its themes, the game feels more bound to its weird implications, not less. Date Everything may be cringe, but it is not free.

Grace Benfell is a queer woman, critic, and aspiring fan fiction author. She writes on her blog Grace in the Machine and can be found @gracemachine on BlueSky.