Ten Dates from Wales Interactive and Good Gate Media is an interactive movie where you’ll go through some speed dating with the hope of finding love. Check our Ten Dates review!
Ten Dates is the sequel to the interactive rom-com, Five Dates, taking place in the post-pandemic world.
Misha, a millennial from London in search of that elusive in-person connection, tricks her best friend Ryan into going to a speed dating event with her. Each with their own five potential matches, Misha and Ryan must pluck up the courage and turn on the charm to date wildly different personalities.
Ten Dates is the follow-up to Five Dates, which I reviewed last year. It was directed by Paul Rashid, who also directed other interactive games like The Complex. In this new release, instead of dating through online video, your lifelong friend Misha tricks Ryan into a speed dating event. Will they find love? That’s for you to make it happen!
If you have already played Five Dates, then this one expands on its idea by presenting a more fully fleshed-out experience that will last a few hours if you’re looking to complete all of its multiple endings. This game is an interactive movie in which you’ll have to please your date. Of course, each character is unique, and you’ll have to understand how they think to develop a relationship with them.
As for the actual gameplay, you’ll watch the interactive movie and enter choices when prompted. The normal way to play the game asks you to think quickly – as you would in real life – to give the best reply possible to please your date. I liked how there’s a mode where the game will pause and let you take your time deciding your reply, and even though it does change the context where you must respond quickly, I enabled it at the beginning of the game and never disabled it. With that being said, the conversation with each date with evolve depending on your choices, and you can miserably fail a date if you do not read the mood. I lived it on my first playthrough, and it is painful to watch. I’m so sorry, Kathleen. I didn’t mean to be rude.
I liked how the game begins with the selection of either Ryan or Misha, and they’ll both have a speed dating session with five different candidates, all of which have their own personalities. If you make a good impression on one or more candidates at the speed dating event, you’ll be presented with selecting up to two candidates for a second date. And if you are also charming at that step, you’ll be able to go on a final date with that candidate and maybe even find love.
I also have to praise the acting of all the characters in this game, as they are all good and believable. The relationship between Ryan and Misha really felt genuine, and it did give me the impression that they were lifelong friends. I preferred the characters in this game over Five Dates, and the overall experience felt more enjoyable, even though the game has the same structure.
Since it also includes ten different characters to date, and each one has a few dialogue choices, I appreciated the replay value of this game once the first run had been completed. When you begin your second game (and all subsequent ones), you can decide which speed-dating candidates you want to focus on so you can achieve this relation without distraction. From my personal experience, every date can be completed within three to four tries as you get to know them, and you can skip already-seen dialogues, so it isn’t tedious.
The game is great looking, and the movie is very professionally done. The video quality is also high, and the video isn’t compressed, which is appreciated for FMV games. On the accessibility level, I already mentioned that the game could pause when you have to reply, and you can also increase the text size. About the text, I was surprised in the launch version that it included a lot of typos and grammatical errors, so hopefully, this will be patched before you get to play the game. Finally, I also noticed that the movie sometimes did freeze by itself when changing scenes, which looked like the video cutting could use some work to increase the immersion.
On the trophies side, this is a fairly comfortable game to achieve its Platinum without even a guide. The full list includes 9 Bronze trophies and 10 Gold trophies. You can focus on specific dates after having completed the game once with each character, so it’s only a matter of pleasing your date. As you get romantic with each of the ten dates, most of the trophies will unlock naturally. The other few are for being miserable and completely failing to impress any date when presented with all five, which is slightly trickier.
I enjoyed playing through Ten Dates with Ryan, then a second time with Misha as the main character, then a few other times to try matching different characters. This game is an interactive movie, knowing that you have a rough idea of what to expect. It is very professionally done, the video quality is great, and the characters are all interesting to meet. I definitively recommend you play this game if you’re a fan of FMV releases. Ten Dates is out today on PlayStation 4, just in time for Valentine’s Day.
Disclaimer
This Ten Dates review is based on a PlayStation 5 copy provided by Wales Interactive.
