Imagine taking a philosophy class where a brilliant, engaging, charismatic professor opens your mind and helps you see the world like you never have before who also pauses every few minutes to play a Frank Zappa album. That should give you a rough idea of what it`s like to play Everything. It`s a game that manages to convey profound beauty and a sense of one`s place in the universe that`s periodically undercut by a compulsive need to interject a sense of twee and abstract randomness. It`s hard to tell how seriously you`re supposed to take it all.Everything is an interactive art project that allows you to transform into nearly any object you find, from planets all the way down to microbes. There are no traditional goals, and except for one particular area, Everything has no hard-and-fast boundaries. It`s just you and the universe, with nothing standing in your way.The dissonance starts from the very beginning. At the outset, you`re a bear in a vast woodland full of creatures living out their lives. They move around by tumbling end over end, stiff as boards, like they`re auditioning to be new Tetris blocks. After spending some time learning the basic controls, you can roam around freely, `sing` to other creatures and things, learn how to hear their thoughts, and figure out how to talk to them to gain their trust and move in groups. It`s the game at its most playful: rocks, animals, and houses will grouse about a friend who`s a jerk or cheerily go on about what a nice day it is all while doing perpetual faceplants to get around.Eventually, one of the plants, animals, or objects you encounter tells you that you can explore things on a smaller scale--and thus, you learn the Descend ability, which allows you to embody a different creature on a lower plane of existence. Thatīs neat by itself, but the real magic occurs when you realize that you don`t have to stop there. Embodying something like an insect is step one. Step two is inhabiting miniscule things like pollen o ...
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