Game review: Everything

“I am one with the Force and the…”

This wasn’t everything we thought it’d be, to be honest. We went in expecting a sweeping, guided adventure that might explain this thing called life. What we got was a procedurally-generated mystery wrapped in an enigma. Everything is odd. But it’s also oddly fun.

It’s pretty simple to play Everything. You “sing” to become flora or fauna (as in shift your consciousness to them), you can dance to multiply out more of your current self, and you can awkwardly roll about the world in search of new things to become.

That’ll occupy your time for the first half an hour or so, until you realise you can consciousness-hop your way right down into the micro level of atoms, or head in the opposite direction to the macro level of universes. While this requires little skill to achieve, it’s the first time we’ve been able to do something like this in a video game. It’s… incredibly novel.

Once you’ve gone from flea to Godsphere and back again, what’s supposed to interest you? Equal parts collecting and learning, it seems. Hoovering up new species to fulfil percentage completions kept us oddly fixated. We also hungered after the rare little speech bubbles that offered up quotes from philosopher Alan Watts.

Also, when you take a form for the first time, that object is added to your in-game encyclopedia (handily catalogued by type). Using this big book of life, you can effectively switch your current form, however, your new guise will be scaled appropriately to your current position in life. For example, you can play as a flea the size of a sun. We once rolled around the cosmos as a duck planet for a while. Just ’cause we could.

All this may not sound particularly engaging in theory, but in practice Everything is quite a zen experience. We spent time happily (and fairly aimlessly) doing whatever we wanted. We learned the odd life lesson, too. Like when we plunged into the kleptomania level of Hell and realised that we were the architects of our own prison. Everything has a few moments like this that will surprise you. But to say more of them is serious spoiler territory.

Everything is beautiful and bizarre, but certainly not for every taste. That said, if you do have an imagination and some patience, transfer yourself into this. It’s a mind-expanding sandbox unlike anything else in gaming.

8/10

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