David OReilly’s Everything Lets You Play as Anything, and That’s the Whole Point

Everything begins with a creature. You move it. Then you stop being it.

Trailer, via Double Fine.

From a Creature to a Star System

Everything is a simulation game built by the artist David OReilly, and it came out on PlayStation 4 on March 21, 2017. The PC and Mac versions followed on April 21, 2017, and Linux on April 28, 2017. A Nintendo Switch version arrived on January 10, 2019, and the game was released in Japan on February 13, 2020.

The premise is simple to state and strange to play. You start as one of many moving creatures. You can shift control to any creature or object smaller than the one you currently hold. The scale of play expands or contracts to match. Keep going and you can only move into smaller and smaller parts of matter, down to the sub-atomic level. Then the game opens up again, and you can take the form of landmasses, planets and whole star systems.

Everything has no enforced goals, no scores and no tasks to complete. You travel between outer and inner space. You explore a vast, interconnected universe of things. The game is a procedural, AI-driven simulation of the systems of nature, seen from the points of view of everything in the Universe.

Alan Watts Narrates the Universe

The late British philosopher Alan Watts narrates. Quotations from Watts appear throughout, presented as you move and shift forms. Other creatures and objects speak as you go.

This is the game’s best decision and its most fragile one. Watts supplies a voice that treats the smallest thing and the largest thing as the same subject. The writing around him does not always earn that register. When a rock or a cell pipes up, the line lands somewhere between insight and fortune cookie. The Watts material is the part that holds.

Singing to a Planet in the Street

When you bond with a form for the first time — by moving or singing — that object is added to an in-game encyclopedia catalogued by type. You can shift back to any form you have already inhabited at any time. That form scales to wherever you are now. Take the form of a planet in the middle of a street and you get a miniature-sized planet.

The encyclopedia is the closest thing Everything has to a goal. Complete it and you occupy all available objects. Do that and a New Game Plus-type mode unlocks, starting you from any random object.

The encyclopedia is also where the game’s tension lives. It is a checklist in a work that otherwise refuses checklists. OReilly has built a universe without scores and then hung a completion meter on it. That meter is what keeps a player moving through the sub-atomic stretch, and it is also what turns wonder into inventory.

A Sandbox With Nothing to Win

Everything sits in a crowded genre space and refuses most of it. Its listed genres are role-playing, simulator, adventure and indie. Its themes are fantasy, sandbox and open world. It is single player and third person. None of those labels tells you what the game actually does, which is let you be a thing, then a smaller thing, then a bigger thing, and ask you to sit with that.

The scale mechanic is the whole game. It is not a gimmick bolted onto a walking simulator. Moving from a creature to a landmass to a star system changes what the screen means. A street is a place until you are a planet standing in it. The game’s levels of existence represent different length scales, and you move between them while shifting into different objects. That is a real design idea, executed without much hand-holding.

What it is not is difficult. There is no failure state worth the name. You cannot lose Everything. You can only stop.

The Influence on Everything Everywhere All at Once

Everything was a primary influence for the climax of the 2022 comedy-drama film Everything Everywhere All at Once. That is the clearest evidence of what OReilly got right. The game’s central move — that a person and a rock and a galaxy are continuous, that the self is a form you can shift out of — is a big enough idea to carry a film. In this paper’s view, that film went on to win the culture over, and the game’s idea is a large part of why.

The game got there first, in 2017, on a smaller budget and with less plot. It did it by removing the things games usually use to hold attention. No combat. No score. No timer. Just scale, an encyclopedia, and a philosopher’s voice.

That restraint is the argument. Everything trusts the player to find the point without being pushed toward it. Mostly that trust pays off.

A 7.2, and What It Measures

Everything scores 7.2 out of 10, the published critic aggregate across nine outlets.

That number is fair, and it is also a little unfair to what the game is. A 7.2 reads as a good game with reservations, and Everything has reservations worth naming. The encyclopedia turns a meditation into a collection task. The speaking objects dilute Watts. The back half of the scale curve, once you have been a star system, does not surprise the way the first descent into sub-atomic matter does.

But the score undersells how much of this game is load-bearing for everything that came after it. The film influence is not trivia. It is proof that the idea at the center of Everything is durable enough to leave the game and keep working.

This is the part worth watching: not whether Everything is fun, because it is only intermittently fun, but whether the industry learned anything from a game that shipped without a win condition. My own read, and this is opinion rather than anything the record establishes, is that it mostly did not. Everything remains a strange, quiet outlier.

Alan Watts · David OReilly · Everything Everywhere All at Once · Everything game · PS4 · simulation games