Everything Review
An experience that will change you
This game was reviewed using a purchased retail copy for PlayStation 4.
Everything the video game is not to be confused with every thing. But then again it is, because Everything lives up to its title. It is everything, including you, and through it you see the world differently. Funnily enough, Everything is only a little bit of a game, and as long as you can accept this, it’s a wonderful experience because Everything is unlike anything else you’ve ever played.
In Everything you can inhabit whatever you discover, from a horse to a spiral galaxy back down to a slice of pizza and a blade of grass. With surprising mechanics, beautiful worlds, and a sly sense of humor, Everything evokes other wondrous experimental interactive encounters like Katamari Damacy and Proteus, but is very much its own entity. It captures the spirit of discovery and play and leaves you thinking about your role and perspective in this great big universe, sending its philosophical pondering home with the recorded speeches of the modern thinker, Alan Watts. But is it a game? Am I?
“Each one of us, not only human beings but every leaf, every weed, exists in the way it does, only because everything else around it does. The individual and the universe are inseparable.”
Alan Watts
Everything was created by David O’Reilly, an artist and animator best known for the intriguing speculative game animations he directed for Spike Jones’s Her. He entered game design in earnest with a contemplative game called Mountain. Mountain is a self-described mountain simulation — what some called an elaborate screen-saver and others called a masterpiece. Both are true. In Mountain you did nothing. Everything goes for the opposite effect.
In Everything you begin as a small spark, and you quickly inhabit a procedurally-generated creature on an Earth-like island. I was a palomino horse. The game gently guides you through its inspired toolset, and you learn to find like groups, reproduce via dance, sing, and eventually to scale yourself upwards and downwards and travel through the known and unknown universe.
“Everything wiggles.”
Alan Watts
The core gameplay elements of Everything feel like an extension of its philosophy, a kind of microcosm for the the game of discovery. Each new tool is gradually unlocked by finding floating thought bubbles containing the glowing geometrical symbol of Everything. They enable an ability and leave you with some related wisdom and guidance on your pursuits to come.
Early on, your horse (or whatever you first inhabit) can only tumble forward or backward, like an inelegant cube being pushed from behind. Nothing that travels on legs in the natural world has been given even the semblance of a walk animation in the game. It’s clunky and it’s funny and it’s beautiful, in much the same way that being a human and living in sack of meat can be. Certain forms of matter proceed forward with a bit more elegance, but there is always an oddness to it that feels intentionally designed. Even when you’re sliding across a planet as a majestic green continent, you’re never too big or too beautiful to feel a bit silly, particularly when you meet something to pair up with and you sing and do the reproduction dance together.
Everything is playful, and watching and seeing is a part of the play. It’s particularly interesting that one of the first things you can do (aside from clunking about) is to let the game play itself in the robust and amusing auto-play setting. An idea typically reserved for demo-mode to a gamer’s mind, here you see Everything progress in surprising ways. The player can manipulate the parameters of the auto-play and be delighted by what the game discovers on its own. You’ll suddenly zoom between a forest and a galactic spiral, only to find yourself moments later dancing with some fire hydrants on a city street or careening past molecules in a pack of bacteria. In this mode the game includes thoughtful definitions of everything that you encounter, a seemingly endless catalog of life and matter.
Scale is at the core of everything in Everything, and O’Reily achieves this best of all. As you uncover more strategies for inhabiting all the things you see, the most noteworthy is the ability to zoom upward and downwards beyond objects and into a whole other realm of perception. Generally, when scaling up or down you enter a creature or object via clicking in to a circle. But when a triangle appears pointing either upwards or downwards, it means that you can shift perspective into a whole other visual space which includes its own perception of time, and here is where your mind truly starts to bend with wonder. You ascend from the ground to the sky to the galaxy and watch seasons pass in seconds, and then descend back down to the bugs and the dirt and the molecules and watch giants above you barely move. This works beautifully, creating a sense of awe and discovery each time you zoom until you’re gloriously lost.
When you aren’t experimenting with the experience of being all the things, the rest of your time is spent witnessing the existential contemplation of all of the creatures and objects that you encounter. You often find small thought clouds that you can read generated by select things you meet, and their dialogues range from the wildly profound to the morbidly absurd, shifting in tone along with your given scale of perception, and often addressing you in a disarming first person. A small moon reminded me, “Everything around you implies your existence. They imply you, Marty.” A spiral galaxy encouraged, “You’re a fractal called here and now in a universe of math and music. You’re perfect.” Creatures that are bound to more terrestrial lands tend to be a bit more cynical, a tree reminded me, “Despite your best efforts, everything will go on being annoying long after you’re gone.”
The final breed of interactive thought bubbles lead to the recorded lectures of Alan Watts. His narration is perfectly tuned to this grander context. Watts was a prolific author and teacher who was one of the first thinkers to present Eastern philosophies to a Western audience, most prominently in the 1950’s and 60’s. His ideas are a thoughtful mixture of Zen Buddhism, Taoism, and an open-minded exploration of the mind. To paraphrase poorly, some of his grandest philosophies tend to propose that we are everything in the universe, and everything in the universe is us, and that that is no big deal. He delights in reminding us that we are all interconnected, and his philosophy is right at home as spoken through a giant rock formation or a school of fish.
Everything is presented beautifully. The animations and objects are simple yet somehow still whimsical in their utilitarian design. Procedurally generated worlds beckon to be explored or just witnessed, and they are accompanied by a subtle and perfect ambient soundtrack by Ben Lukas Boysen and Sebastian Plano that is both emotional and relaxing. It is easy to get lost in its dense world for hours if you are so inclined.
But Everything is not for everyone. Is it a game or a work of art or an interactive experience? Yes. But it is not Halo, nor even Katamari Damacy. There are a small number of puzzle-like things to do in order to unlock the main tool set and complete the so-called tutorial, and should you have a collectible frame of mind, there are endless possibilities of things in the universe to inhabit and check off that list — the game does indeed keep track for you. But if you are looking for your next big gaming fix, you may be disappointed. More than anything else, Everything is a philosophical sandbox to play in, a catalogue of things that asks you to be a part of it (or insists that you already are). But it doesn’t care much for measured achievement (though funnily there are many trophies to earn such as ‘Becoming’ and ‘You Are Nothing’ on the PS4 edition).
And if you let it, Everything succeeds marvelously. The sum of Everything’s parts is a unique and inspiring experience. In the strictest sense of gameplay, there isn’t a lot going on. In the strictest sense of art or philosophy, it isn’t coming down terribly hard on a premise. And it works. It sings, it hums, it soothes, it elates, it makes you think and feel and see things differently. It proposes that the game we are playing is simply one aspect of an even larger one, reminding us that we are as much a part of the play as anything in it. In doing so, it leaves room for contemplation and invites a sense of wonder and joy. It all resonates perfectly and is more welcome than ever in an age of increased alienation and detachment.
As I got closer to unlocking most of tools in the game, another tree paused to let me in on some secrets (as they do). “Everything is a game based on the game you are in,” the tree said to me, “and if we’re being honest, it’s a pretty shabby reflection of it. But this isn’t about giving you something different to see, but giving you a different way of seeing.”
Everything is being humble, because Everything is a wonder to behold.
I played Everything on the PS4, it is also available on the PC and Mac
http://everything-game.com | https://twitter.com/eeverythingg
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Hi my name is Marty. I make all sorts of things: books, art, puppets, sandwiches, you name it. Please follow me on Twitter and Instagram, both @martystuff.
Thanks for reading what I wrote, and keep being awesome!
Originally published at www.martystuff.com.
