Has humanity ever had a worse idea than speed dating? Once you forget all the obviously terrible stuff like biological weapons and motion controls, speed dating must be right up there. Five minutes of pish banter with a person who isn’t laughing at any of your killer jokes before you half-heartedly ask for contact information and they give you the look you’d give to a sick dog before it gets put to sleep. Brutal.
A video game about speed dating should surely be a survival horror title, but for some reason Wales Interactive opted to make Ten Dates — sequel to Five Dates, which we enjoyed, albeit for mostly the wrong reasons — another romantic comedy interactive film. Like that game, this is a movie that you watch, only you have frequent choices to make about how to act or what to say, and these choices result in different responses from your various dates. The choices are timed by default, but you can set the game to pause whenever there’s a decision to be made so you can try and make sure you don’t embarrass yourself, which is something we can probably all agree we’d benefit from in real life.
This time there’s two protagonists with five potential love interests each, with same-sex options for both characters. It’s also got a couple of (intentional) laughs and there’s one pairing of characters that we actually thought were genuinely sweet together.
But the main reason we’ll be recommending Ten Dates more highly than Five Dates is simple: spite. There was a moment early into the game during an excruciating date with a cryptocurrency peddler slash beautician and all we wanted to do was tell her just how rotten the experience of talking to her had been, and lo and behold the option presented itself. There’s spite options now.
We upset the cliché goth girl who is like, really into horoscopes and stuff. We upset the ow’right guv’nor lad’s lad who looked like he was AI generated using only the phrase “probably watches Love Island“. We upset the dork student who actually got her book out and started reading it mid-date rather than talk to us. We upset everyone. Speed dating? Spite dating. That’s the future.
