David O’Reilly’s Everything is quite the experience and journey to undertake. It’s simple, yet deep. It asks you to think about ‘just being’, but encourages you to explore the thoughts and emotions of other beings in the game. It’s a lightly addictive game that will have you staring at your television for hours and leave you wanting to keep the experience alive for no particular reason other than to keep going, which could be a metaphor for any living creature struggling to know the how and why they exist.
Welcome to the sandbox you’re apart of and that you make happen, as much as it makes you happen.
Welcome to Everything.
David O’Reilly’s Everything is an interesting and unique title. It’s an open world experience that has specific sets of purpose, while at the same time has no purpose at all, other than what the user wants to create from it. It’s a continual cycle of ‘just being’, yet being everything you can come in contact with that is living (plants, planets, animals, etc), which you can just become and experience. Sound confusing yet? Welcome to my first thoughts of the game.
Everything starts out with the gamer choosing an animal to play as in a large visually uninspired world, purposely uninspired in comparison to other open world games. Anyway, you are encouraged to pick an animal to explore with, for me it was a moose, which doesn’t simply walk around the landscape, rather it somersaults across the landscape in choppy frame rate fashion. Believe me, when this was the start of the game, I nearly turned it off and thought someone was playing a cruel joke. But the game isn’t a joke. In fact, it’s a serious discussion on existence itself. How do I get that from a somersaulting moose? Easily.
Everything allows you to transfer your consciousness, ascend or descend, into another living being. If you wanted to become the tree sitting next to your moose, you merely click on L2 and ascend to the tree’s consciousness. If want to become the rock sitting on the ground next to your moose, you click on R2 and descend to the rock’s consciousness. Either way you go, you can experience a different being by simply becoming them. Along with this experience, you get a sense of how they live, move and talk. It’s an interesting concept for a game, but one that is lightly addictive (in a good way).
That is the crux of the game.
You might be thinking to yourself, as was I, why in the hell would I want to do this over and over again for multiple hours? Having played it extensively, I’m still wondering that, but at the same time I’m not missing those hours during my Everything experience. The reason being, as I have pondered extensively, is that maybe wanting to see how far I can go up or down the rabbit hole is the driving motivation. From moose > rock > microorganism > atom and then into a celestial body of space/planets, one in which Doctor Strange would be comfortable in, which leads into a new environment with new animals to start the process over. It’s a loop or a cycle, which as we learned in the Lion King, is the way life works. There are no stops/starts/deaths/real obstacles — it’s just simply ‘being’. Everything’s gameplay design will make you want to keep going for no good reason other than to see what you can find.
It’s strange how that works with the game, but fascinating and engrossing once the process gets started.
The additional pieces the game offers to keep you motivated in your journey of ‘being’ include accomplishing tasks such as talking to other beings, dancing with other beings, ‘producing’ other beings and reading/putting together thoughts that other beings share with you. The added bonus of the journey is the random collection of Alan Watts’, a famous British Philosopher, thoughts on life and why we exist, as well as how we exist. His speech, which is incredibly comforting and fascinating to the ear while playing Everything, will have you exploring more and more of the game as you get further into it, if not only to find more of Watts.
It’s an amazing game when you put all of these things together. It’s comforting, cold in some ways, honest in others, but ultimately it’s a gaming experience that creates reassurance that we’re not alone in this world and without us, you and me, there would be no ‘them’. Who them might be is why you keep exploring Everything. Them is Everything and everything is them.
This game won’t be for everyone, but it certainly will guarantee to produce interest and intrigue.
