David O’Reilly’s Everything is an open world sandbox game that explores the connections within its vast and infinite world. Much like our universe, Everything focuses on the chained connections of the world and how everything works together as one. Making you question, why everything in the world is the way that it is and where it all comes from. The aim of the game is to simply discover the world and become everything and anything you want to be, collecting data and filling your progress along the way. From cows, bugs, plants, islands and even fencing. There are hundreds of things to become and discover.
Ascend out into the furthest reaches of the galaxy, becoming asteroids, planets and even so far as 1 dimensional objects. Descend in the microscopic world, becoming bugs, organisms and cell life. Everything changes your perspective on the universe, allowing you to see what the world looks like through the eyes of all its creatures and lifeforms.
The game is a single player game that is played through a simple set of controls making traversing the land a simple task. Many of the specimens you become move in a way that is fluid and beautiful, whereas others, such as the animals within the world rotate and roll around, adding a bit of humor to an otherwise serious game. Select buttons allow you to ascend or descend into the world, whilst others allow you to sing to others, flock together or dance together with things of a similar nature to you.
However, if you don’t feel like playing and want to just enjoy the beautiful graphics and music, you can play in auto play mode. This allows the user to select a creature within the environment, as they would normally do and then sit back and watch as the creature traverses the land and often leads you to your next, thought bubble or audio clip.
The graphics of the game are surrealist and cartoonist impressions of what certain objects, animals and environments look like. The art style is poetically accurate and compliments the dreamlike audio well. The minimalist design allows you to lose yourself within the audio and narration. The bigger the object you become, the faster the time moves, making beautiful sunsets, shimmering seas and starry galaxies captivate you even more. Reminiscent to games such as ABZU or Shelter, Everything brings beauty back to gaming in an extraordinary way.
The music within the game helps to add to the dream-like world that is Everything. The classically orchestrated music, consisting of instruments such as cellos, violins and pianos, adjusts depending on the environment you are in or the specimen you have become.
When transforming into an item, you have the ability to “sing”, which allows you to communicate with other creatures around you, in the noise that your creature would make. Choosing to sing to others around you allows you to hear them sing back.
Upon your journey, you will also find audio clips hidden in various areas of the game. These audio clips are lectures by Alan Watts, a prolific author and speaker who talks about wisdom and the ways of the universe. These clips immerse you into the world of Everything and make you question everything that happens every day.
At times, especially in the early stages of the game, it was unclear of what you had to do to progress. But after a few moments of exploration and helpful tips for the controls appearing quite often at the bottom of the screen, you realize that that’s exactly the point. You progress however much you want to, by exploring the environments and unlocking new discoveries of animals, objects and organisms. This fact within itself is what makes Everything such a remarkable game. It has extraordinary replay value due to the mass amounts of things that you can discover and become.
In conclusion, everything is a game that captivates players into its surreal and beautiful world. It encourages them to explore and discover from different perspectives of creatures within the world. Its dream-like art style and music allows the player to escape into a new world, representative to ours, whilst making them question why our world is the way it is and how everything works together. Everything has great replay value, that allows you to explore however you want to and is a great game for anyone who loves animals.
REVIEW CODE: A Free Nintendo Switch code was provided to Brash Games for this review. Please send all review code enquiries to editor@brashgames.co.uk.
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