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Everything is an unusual game. It’s also a game that is far too easy to make jokes about – so much so that even the initial loading screen does it: “Everything is loaded.” After you pass the loading screen, you are dropped into the mind of an animal on a rocky planet. And, true to the name of the game, you eventually find yourself hopping from animal to animal, letting you play as everything. Soon, I controlled a fleet of animals and we galloped across the plain:
Much later, I dropped a few goats into the first dimension. That’s probably the most amusing thing I’ve done in a video game in a long while, and I was far more satisfied with that than I had a right to be.
I played this game for five hours instead of the requisite one. For much of that time, I was having fun. Even so, I’m not sure it makes it into Tier One for a variety of reasons. First, my motivation to play for six hours was mostly based in the desire to play as everything (the game keeps track of how many things you have played as). I had technically “completed” the game (or at least the tutorial) in the first 90 minutes.
Second, the audio clips you find throughout the game are full of some of the worst philosophy and misunderstandings/misstatements of science that I have heard in a long time – to the point that I was angered rather than soothed whenever I found one. I should clarify: it is not so much that I disagree with the philosophical argument being put forward: rather, it is that I have a problem with it being presented in a way meant only to sound “heady” (and often ends up misstating scientific principles because of it). It is designed to make you feel enlightened without actually enlightening you. This is, however, the fault of Alan Watts rather than the game – in fact, the game does a better job of delivering the philosophy.
My final hesitation with this game comes from two choices in implementation. It took a bit of time, but it became apparent that despite the many places it seems you can go, there are really only three or four shards of each unique environment. The goats I had left in the first dimension came back each time I passed through. The objects I had moved showed up again on another planet in another universe. Worse, each individual environment is very, very small. It may not appear that way, but each place you go is just a very small area that loops back on itself.
I think that final issue could have been solved through some randomization, but it may have been intended as a deliberate design choice. Perhaps I’m asking too much, but the game is called Everything. The most difficult part of making a game feel expansive is hiding the boundaries and limiting your ability to get to them. That’s why Skyrim feels huge – there are only three or four points that simply stop your character from proceeding further. Everything initially feels big, but starts shrinking rapidly the moment you start noticing the repetition.
With that, here’s a Space Holstein. You can’t see it very well from the picture, but that cow is actually the size of the sun. So it’s not all bad.
