Everything (PS4 / PC)

johnny_ultimate

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYHp8LwBUzo

The latest game from Irish artist David O'Reilly - the guy behind Mountain and the video game bits in the wonderful film Her. Out on PS4 now, PC next month.

Everything lives up to its name, at least as much as a small indie game feasibly can. Effectively you can control everything you see, but more than that you can also ascend and descend to different layers. So if you go upwards from a penguin you'll go from a tree to a continent to a cloud to a planet and all the way upwards. On the downwards scale you can descend to the microscopic level and beyond that again.

The tone is captured well in that memorable extended trailer, but obviously it's a joy to play to simply discover the sheer vastness of the thing. It is completely bizarre and amusing at times, but also has moments of real beauty and insight. Especially if you follow the game's lightly imposed tutorial through to its conclusion you'll discover the sort of intimate, personal depths you probably didn't think you'd find when you first took control of a lightly animated polar bear farcically rolling around a snowfield.

Everything reminds me the Katamari series when it was good, albeit with grander philosophical intentions. Both are weird, distinctive and obsessed with things. This hypnotic game is another step up from Katamari's joyous kleptomania - a game about life, the universe and entire buildings just casually traversing the landscape, not giving a ****. It's not like anything else, and it follows that it won't be liked by everyone. But I've already lost hours to it

Mentioned before for another game but Boards should really try and engage with irish games developers and get them on for AMA's like sites like reddit do sometimes. I have questions for this guy about this

My partner is currently enthralled by this game.

johnny_ultimate

Very, very fond of this game after a few hours with it. Impressed by its juggling of the sublime and ridiculous: a game that seems in constant dialogue with itself but never afraid to have some fun. The more tools you unlock to distort and play with the sandbox, the more interesting it becomes. Some of the game's logical (and even technical - got a good few laughs out of what happens when you purposely break the game) end-points are inspired, and there's ample possibility to create scenes that are surreal, beautiful or straight-up ludicrous. I had feared the game's novelty would wear off after an hour, but to be fair there's a lot of cool little & big secrets to discover if you poke around.

[Deleted User] wrote: »

Mentioned before for another game but Boards should really try and engage with irish games developers and get them on for AMA's like sites like reddit do sometimes. I have questions for this guy about this

I'm not sure in this case an AMA would pay many dividends: based on the limited interviews for Mountain, O'Reilly's very much a 'let the work speak for itself' kinda guy and I think his answers would infuriate as much as they'd illuminate. That said, he's active on twitter so I dunno

Potential-Monke

I have no idea what that is, but i'm intrigued... Why do the animals go head over tails though?!

johnny_ultimate

Potential-Monke wrote: »

I have no idea what that is, but i'm intrigued... Why do the animals go head over tails though?!

Mostly because it's funny I think encountering a rolling animal as one of your first 'things' is a good tone-setter - you shouldn't take the game 100% seriously, and no better way to illustrate that than with ludicrous rolling animals.

Could also be a consequence of a tiny development team, but mostly I reckon it's just silly on purpose!