Everything Research

Everything is a game created by David O’Reilly that explores themes of existence and significance in relation to peoples understanding of scale. The game conveys an almost spiritual journey through the thoughts of all existence as various sentient and non-sentient beings share their thoughts about the meaning of existence. The core gameplay consists of you acting as a disembodied entity that can take the form of anything that is present in the game. Through this there are two main mechanics for the player to explore. One is connecting with other entities of the same type and creati9ng a group that follows you around, the second is the ability to shift to a different scale, allowing you to possess entities of different sizes. And example of this would be that the player could get so small that they can possess quarks but they can then go a size smaller and find themselves in a new universe at the maximum size they can be, implying that there are infinite universes within each other. Whilst this is set up to be the major reveal of the game and arguably the climax of it, outside of this there is no real gameplay other than the lose goal of completing your encyclopaedia by possessing everything in existence. As a result, the game is designed to play as an educational explorative experience, with the game introducing audio narration from British philosopher and theologian Alan Watts throughout the game to act as prompts for the player to think about the nature of existence and the game. Because of this whilst the game is very lacking in gameplay content, it makes it up by relying on the players through provocation to act as the game content. Whilst an experience-based game like this is good gaining a large amount of attention very quickly it isn’t very good at maintaining a player base as there is no reason to revisit the game after you have experienced it.

Generally, I didn’t play games for singular experience because they seem like a waste in money as a player due to the lack gameplay and replay ability, especially with games like Everything where you can have the practically the exact same experience watching it on YouTube. However, an aspect of the game that I did like was the use of the comedic animations for the animals as whilst some thought it detracted from the thought-provoking nature of the game, I thought that it made it far more accessible to people who wouldn’t normally be interested in the type of experience that the game had to offer.