Minesweeping Your Way Into The Hearts of Ladies Everywhere: A DateJournal Review

By Manuel

Players: 1
Platforms: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5

DateJournal is a dating sim that features far more gameplay elements than you would think. It somehow brings together visual novel elements, a take on Minesweeper, and even board games into something that is as indescribable as it is unique. It's coming soon the Nintendo Switch, PS4, and PS5, and we're going to be taking a look at this game today to see if it has what it takes to stand out in a rather crowded genre, and try to explain how a with so many different gameplay elements actually plays. The girls aren't going to wait around forever though, so let's jump right into the review!

The board that makes up much of the game.

Our six lovely ladies.

I'm going to talk more about the romanceable girls later on in the review, but DateJournal puts you into the shoes of a nameless guy who is trying to get into the pants of the six girls in St. Petersburg, Russia. I mention the location because it actually plays heavily into the storylines themselves, and I found the use of a setting I know very little about to be quite enjoyable. I don't want to imply that I think this is in any way an accurate representation of St. Petersburg itself, but I'm so used to the overused settings one finds in Japanese, or Japanese-inspired, dating sims that anything different is a welcome break. The core game takes place on a game board that represents the city, with your playing piece moving along the various spots by way of cards instead of dice. Cards in this game actually remind me a lot of Animal Crossing amiibos as they have a similar amount of functional information on them. They can be used to purchase the gifts pictured on them once per turn, they can grant one-time bonuses upon use, and they can also move you the number shown on the dice in the corner. The game board has various spaces you can stop on, some being blank, some offering stat bonuses, and some being locations you can enter. You have three core stats that raise your skills in the main Minesweeper game (I'll get to that in a bit!), and those are Charm, Intelligence, and Strength. Points in these stats can be used to level up your skills at the Gym (Strength), the University (Intelligence), and the Club (Charm). There are also random events that can occur that are all RNG-based, but the odds can be increased if you have certain skills high enough. This is a dating sim though, so how do you meet the girls? Each term will see 2-4 girls spawn on the board via locations specific to them. Each time a girl spawns on a space, you have a certain number of turns to get to them before they leave. If you get to them in time you can chat with them or ask them on a date. Chatting is done in a normal visual novel fashion, but the dates are where the Minesweeper elements come into play. If you miss a girl on the map, don't worry as they will return after a few turns. This may all sound overly complicated at first, and I'll admit it took me a while to truly understand the game, but it'll all become second nature after a while.

The Minesweeper game in action.

Why would you bring that outfit on a date?!?!

Going on dates is the most important thing in DateJournal, as a successful date is the only way to level up a girl's affection for you. Going on a date means you play a game of Minesweeper. At least the game itself calls it Minesweeper, but I know next to nothing about the original game and can't accurately say that what's here resembles the popular free game that used to come bundled with Windows that I never knew how to play. Anyway, the goal in DateJournal's Minesweeper is to hit the point target located at the top of the screen. You do this by gathering blue and red stars, with red stars offering up the most points. Roses also appear and these increase passion. As far as I was able to tell, later games of Minesweeper will see your passion meter max out through normal gameplay, so it's best to avoid roses past a certain point. You want to avoid unnecessary items because every action you take uses up energy. Energy can be recovered by picking up lightning bolts, and by using some items hidden in boxes. Your goal is to find the key in each room as soon as possible, while picking up as many stars as you can, and move onto the next room without having to touch any broken stars or monsters. Monsters black out spaces and have to be destroyed to make those spaces clickable again. This costs energy, points, and generally just sets back your progress. Defeating monsters is necessary in some levels though, as sometimes dead spaces might have the room's key. Broken stars are arguably worse than the monsters as they greatly reduce your score. The only way to get around them is to either take the hit, or turn them into more beneficial pick-ups via items from the present boxes. Early games of Minesweeper start off relatively easy, but they get very hard by the end of the game. They actually increase in difficulty per successful date, and aren't reset when you switch to another girl. That means that you'll face a similarly difficult game of Minesweeper no matter which girl you are currently on a date with. The only way to make the Minesweeper game easier is by leveling up your character, or you can just get good at it of course. It may sound like the most off-the-wall addition to a game like this, and far too complicated for its own good, but trust me when I say that it can be a very fun aspect of the game once you master its ins and outs.

Getting those gains in skills!

Of COURSE I wrote it down!

Most dating sims/visual novels are usually filled with walking anime tropes for characters, and I'm glad that's not the case in DateJournal. Don't get me wrong, this is a very trope-filled cast of characters, but they're still different than a lot of what you see in other games of this type. First up you have Vasilisa, a blonde college girl who loves to party. Next up is Vlada, a photographer who is sort of the "good girl" of the bunch. Polina is a police officer, and I guess she fulfills the "woman in a uniform" trope. Yana is the youngest at 20, and she's a foul-mouthed rebel who isn't afraid to talk openly of her sexual escapades. Julia is an older career woman who hires you for a personal assistant in more ways than one. Lastly there's Anna, the "MILF" of the group. Anna is not only a mother, but she's also married. Over the course of the game you fill out your journal with all their details, answer questions about yourself in a fashion that hopefully pleases them, and sometimes get quizzed on what they've told you already. These dialogue scenes actually only serve to increase your points in the three stats, and don't affect their affection for you. As far as dates go, they all draw from the same pool as to where they prefer, but each have a different shuffling of four locations. Each date location see the girl change into a different outfit that's relevant to the location, and you unlock the final one once you hit max affection with them. Each girl has a set number of locations she'll spawn at, so you'll want to keep an eye on those if you're going for a particular one. Another interesting point is that each girl also represents one of the three stats. Well, there's actually two for each stat, but you know what I mean. Continued interaction with them once you've maxed out their affection is not only a way to complete all the missing info for them, but also an easy way to continue to build your skills if you have a completed Journal entry for them. Need strength? Find Polina. Need Intelligence? Better hope Vlada is around, and so on. They're all a great bunch and definitely have their own personalities that you'll discover over time. I will admit that it's a little odd that you're juggling all the girls at once for much of the game, and none of the storylines ever seem to quite match up, but I guess that can be overlooked as I'm not sure how else they'd have implemented things. That's the thing actually, you're not just dating these girls to eventually sleep with them, you're also going through a specific storyline with each of them. I won't give them away as I don't want to spoil anything for those wanting to experience the game for themselves, but I was pleasantly surprised by how well-written they all were.

That's a lot of text!

The most suggestive pic I'll share here.

Now I have to discuss something that shocked me while I was playing the game, and that's the fact that DateJournal has some pretty explicit images that feature full-on nudity. It's nothing too extreme I will admit, as there's no actual sex or male nudity, but I wasn't expecting it nonetheless. The game sort of pushes you into a relationship with Vasilisa first since she's the one in the tutorial, and I don't know what I was expecting when I filled up her affection meter to near max, but it definitely wasn't her showing up at my house for sex. By the way, that's how all the storylines end, you go back to your house for the final chapter. I did think it was a bit much when one of her pictures showed her in her underwear, and there are lots of dialogue bits across all the characters that go hard into the 18+ territory, but I was not expecting to see her naked in the final image of her gallery. Things only got crazier from there as I soon discovered that other girls had nude photos before their final one, and one girl's final outfit is her half-naked in an open robe. I won't spoil who has what in those examples, but this game never really stopped shocking me. I guess it shouldn't be too surprising considering I'd heard that there are lots of games like this on the Nintendo Switch already, but I've reviewed some in the past (namely 17Studio's Hentai series) and they weren't anywhere near the level you get here. I mention the Nintendo Switch in particular as I'm willing to bet that Sony's more draconian censorship policies will see the game altered on their platforms. That said, I still stand by the fact that the entire package makes getting to these pictures a lot more fun than the standard ecchi game. Rather than only hiding them behind a cheap puzzle game mechanic, DateJournal has pretty well-defined gameplay AND a standard visual novel interface that makes this more than just a collection of lewd pictures disguised as a game. I don't want to make it sound like the game was somehow made worse by including lots of nudity, far from it even, but I do think it's worth mentioning as I'm still not convinced that a casual glance at the eShop page will give it away.

Let's talk about the visuals in DateJournal for a second. Since I just talked about them, I want to discuss the pictures you unlock in the gallery, nudes and all. I found these the most interesting thing in the game as they have a hand-painted art style that you don't see elsewhere. Part of me wished there was more of this in the main game, but I'm pleased with what we got. Art aside, I think the character models and designs all look great, even though I had a bit of trouble discerning one older woman with dark hair (Anna) from another older woman with dark hair (Julia). The different outfits were quite a varied lot too, even if some of them are a bit outlandish. (I'm looking at you Polina! Who changes into a SWAT outfit for a date?!?) I did find it a bit odd that some of the girls' hair length seemed to change from one outfit to the next, but that can be explained away decently enough even if it was in the IRL, so I chose to overlook it for the most part. The backgrounds are a little uninspired in my opinion, but they were nice enough and I assume that they feature a couple St. Petersburg landmarks within them. The only other thing left to mention would have to be the Minesweeper game itself. It probably will come as a shock to no one that I think the graphics found in that game stick out more than anything else. It's almost as if they were taken from a completely different standalone game and inserted into here. Actually, I wouldn't at all be surprised if that's exactly what went on during development. It's not like they're horrible or anything (though they are a bit ugly looking), but they clash with the other visual styles and stick out like a sore thumb. I had enough fun with the Minesweeper gameplay that I stopped noticing after a while, but all the issues I had at first with them came flooding back once I started organizing my screenshots for this review. No single aspect of the visuals are bad by any means, some of them are even fairly amazing for the most part, it's just that the differing visual styles sometimes don't gel as well with each other as much as I think they should've.

Yana can be a bit insufferable at times.

ACAB by the way...

I don't know what to say when it comes to sound as there are some tracks and sound effects that seem stuck in my head for all the wrong reasons. This is especially true for everything associated with the Minesweeper game, and I swear the laugh that the monsters make when they appear will haunt me for years to come. Other than that, most of the music is standard visual novel/dating sim fare. By that I mean that it's mostly inoffensive, gives off chill vibes, and has a generic-ness to it that is both welcoming, but also makes me wonder if the soundtrack isn't just a collection of royalty-free songs the developers found somewhere. This is by no means a knock to DateJournal in particular, as I feel that most visual novels/dating sims have soundtracks like this. They work well for the game they're in, but they most just exist in the background. The best thing I can say about it is that no track ever stood out in bad way to me, and I'm not even particularly annoyed that I had to hear that aforementioned laugh hundreds of times throughout my time with the game. My only true issue with the sound would have to be that I think it could've benefitted from at least a little bit of voice acting. I'm positive that the scope of this game, being a smaller indie title, would've never allowed for it to be fully voiced, but a few quips here and there from the girls would've really added to the atmosphere. A small one-liner or two when they arrive, when they're happy or sad, when you succeed in a random event on the game board, or when you're leaving from a date would've added a lot of character to everything. I've seen similar things in other titles of this size, and it's the only thing I truly wish the game would've had.

Depending on a player's skill and luck with the Minesweeper game, it can take about 5-10 hours to 100% DateJournal. My completion time was somewhere in that window, and I even went around making sure I filled out each girls' journal entry and spent as many skill points as I could. I was even tempted to max out the skills, but that seemed like a bit too much for a game like this, so I gave up partway through. While I will admit that there isn't a whole lot of reason to go back to this game once you've completed it, its $14.99 price tag seems perfect for the level of content you get. If you can get behind the odd mix of gameplay genres, then you're sure to get a lot of bang for your buck here. Maybe even literally! The sheer novelty of having a game like this on your Nintendo Switch almost seems with the price of admission alone. While I lament the fact that there isn't any post-game content beyond just going on the same dates over and over again, what's here seems almost perfectly balanced as is.

Julia is the most forward of all the girls.

This is the goal after all...

While I can't really give DateJournal an open recommendation for obvious reasons, I do think it's a really great game. If you had told me last week that there's a game that mixes together board games, Minesweeper, and an 18+ dating sim into a title that's both fun and entertaining, I wouldn't have believed you. That's exactly what I'm saying here though, and I give it a full recommendation for anyone who is a fan of any of those three genres. Obviously this is a game that I must emphasize is only for those who are 18+ due to the amount of nudity present. If you can get beyond that though, it's a whole lot of fun and it's a game that I can honestly say is like no other. Check it out if you can, and be sure to let me know who your favorite girl is. (Mine's Vasilisa by the way!)

Check Out DateJournal on Nintendo Switch:
https://www.nintendo.com/us/store/products/datejournal-switch/

---

Story: A
Gameplay: B+
Graphics: A-
Music/Sound: B
Value: A-

Overall: B+

Pros:
+ A cool dating sim that successfully mixes together several genres that you wouldn't think would work well together.
+ The board game overworld, Minesweeper dates, and stat-based level up rewards mean that the game is more than simply picking the right option in a dialogue tree.
+ Though some of the art styles can vary quite a bit from one another, most of the visuals in DateJournal are great.
+ Surprisingly well-written storylines and characters for a genre that sometimes goes for the lowest hanging fruit.
+ Though the genre is mainly known for titles that borrow heavily from anime tropes, DateJournal's six girls seem far more grounded in reality.
+ There's a lot of content here for its current asking price.
+ There's a certain novelty to owning a game that features lots of nudity on a console like the Nintendo Switch.

Cons:
- Though a somewhat regular element in the genre, the presence of nudity and sexual situations limit the audience.
- While I personally enjoyed the Minesweeper gameplay, the graphics and tone of it seem completely out of place with everything else.
- Could have really used a bit of voice acting at times to break up the walls of text.
- Some of the writing and dialogue can be a bit cringe at times.
- There really isn't a lot of reason to come back to the game once you've completed it.

A copy of this game was provided to us free-of-charge by the publisher for the purpose of this review. This did not affect our review in any way.

---

I actually like Anna too, but her storyline is a bit awkward because of the cheating.

#DateJournalConsoles