Rating
Everything
Everything is an interactive experience where everything you see is a thing you can be, from animals to planets to galaxies and beyond. Travel between outer and inner space, and explore a vast, interconnected universe of things without enforced goals, scores, or tasks to complete. Everything is a procedural, AI-driven simulation of the systems of n...
Details
- Released
- March 21, 2017
- Developer
- David OReilly
- Genres
- Role-playing (RPG) · Simulator · Adventure · Indie · Open world
- Publisher
- David OReilly, Double Fine Productions
Similar Games
Everything Reviews
Professional reviews from gaming critics
Really, the best way to describe Everything is that it’s a game that lets you play as everything. I don’t mean that in the sense that you can play as anything, though you can do that (at least, any of roughly 1000 different things coded into the game). Rather, I mean that it’s a game that lets you play as a conceptual Everything – that one grand, all-encompassing thing that we are all part of, that binds us together, and that exists within all of us.
Playing the new art-game, learning tool, zen meditation, universe simulator thing from developer David OReilly is a very special experience. It’s a game where being is the primary goal and seeing the world in new ways is profound in its regularness. It will change your life if you let it.
Everything won’t be for everyone. Some people probably won’t find it terribly engaging. Some people will probably think it’s trying to be preachy or they’ll bemoan the lack of stuff to do. But Everything wasn’t made for them. It was made for people like me; people who want to experience something cerebral and emotional when they play a video game, people who want profundity and philosophy in their lives, people who don’t solely get off on gun-toting, ass-kicking violence. People who can be given something with little instruction and told, simply: ‘Play’.
Check out PlayStation LifeStyle's Everything PS4 review to find out how David OReilly's adventurous, and highly experimental, PlayStation 4 title fares.
Everything provides a mellow environment to explore, with the perfect auditory compliments for your journey. The experience may be lost on some, but that's okay. Others will thoroughly enjoy getting lost in the experience, despite minor frustrations like the needle-in-a-haystack search.
I respect the idea behind Everything, and I’m glad that developer David O’Reilly decided to try something experimental with an interactive medium. I can appreciate a game that hides meaning beneath its surface, but Everything doesn’t have a surface-level story for that meaning to hide under. Alan Watts’ philosophy lectures are intriguing, but it’s not very interesting getting from one lecture to the next. I was never able to be engaged or immersed in the world. Despite being a game about how all things are related, I found the silly, empty experience of Everything very unrelatable.
A nice, weird walk and a philosophical lecture, both unfortunately ruined by how hard the game drives its point home. Everything would be cleverer if it wasn't seemingly trying to be so clever.
Come check out Everything. A game about being everything. Despite it being officially described as a simulation game I found it to be something else entirely. It's novel, but is it worth your money and time? Let's find out.
The main game was more of the same. There are new things that spice up the gameplay like being able to change your size and change into anything at will, regardless of where you are, it was not enough for me to want to continue playing. After the novelty of being a giant whale in space stopped, so did my want in playing this game.
What you get out of Everything will depend entirely on you. You may get bored within minutes just as easily as you could spend hours wandering around alien continents as a slice of pizza. I’m not sure it can be described as fun in a traditional sense, and it sometimes feels like you are being forced to sit through through a complex lecture mixed with a dash of group therapy, but other times it can be utterly hilarious as you make baby tractors by dancing.
This is an exceptional piece of fantasy fiction, a metamorphosis machine, a toy, a game like no other. It’s a work of deep imagination, humor and thoughtfulness. Everything held me captive for many hours, and will continue to do so. It’s brave, bizarre, compelling and beautiful.