Culture

Platform: PC (2/5).
In Dinner Date’s unnecessary tutorial, Stout Games tries to make it clear that your interactivity in the game is somewhat limited. Big text banners crowning the screen read “In Dinner Date you do not play as yourself”, “Nor do you play as the main character” and finally “In Dinner Date you play as the subconscious of Julien Luxemburg”. I shan't relate plot details to you (since these end up being all that Dinner Date has going for it) suffice to say that Julien is waiting for his date to arrive and she is running late. From a first-person seated perspective, you survey a conservative, bare, but warmly wood-clad apartment kitchen and hear Luxemburg's sporadic soliloquy.
 

For a little developer, the production values are sharp. Bread looks tasty, the candle casts a nice shadow around the not quite cell-shaded kitchen. Even the wine was appealing, and I think wine is a scam. More importantly the writing is good. We've come to realise that theatre-style monologues are nothing like how people actually think but, accepting that, Julien's stream-of-consciousness takes you on a grounded journey through various emotional states. We can see ourselves in the way he justifies his actions, and his progression of moods is well paced.

 
If I've done my job, by now you might be thinking something like “Oh, cool. So as a character's subconscious I get to very subtly influence the actions of the protagonist in different directions in a well written and stylish context”. I enjoyed the first ten minutes of the twenty minute game because that's what I assumed I was doing. It was only after stirring my soup for twelfth time that I realized all I was doing was whirlpooling a tomato concoction, glancing at the clock and stretching out my mildly aching shoulders over and over again.

 
Dinner Date positively aches to be taken seriously, to be a true art-videogame. “Look at me!” it cries, “I'm not about murder or collecting brightly coloured baubles; I'm about worry and life's poignant mundanities”. It breaks from other attempts at art-games - which draw from arty-pants touchstones like plinky and morose piano solos, the sound of the wind, empty vistas and slightly creepy little children - by having Julien Luxemburg quote poetry in non-specific European-tinged English.
 

I feel bad criticising Dinner Date. Anything this unique should be encouraged but it shouldn't grant a free pass. Ultimately, the question is whether the very, very slight interactivity of Dinner Date greatly alters it. Would this have worked just as well as a short film? I admit that the game is initially striking, but after the novelty wears off, you're left with motionless gazpacho.