Everything

"Everything" was no doubt an interesting experience. It kept me engaged until the end, although this feels like the kind of game that may be better suited to certain people.
There isn’t all that much to really do here. At first, you explore. If you’re interested in the audio clips from Alan Watts’ philosophy lectures, then you explore and listen. After that, if you continue and keep going, you may get bored of the exploring but become engaged in collecting. If you’re not remotely interested in philosophy (or at least, listening to someone babble on in philosophy talk) nor interested in collecting, completing, perfecting, I think there is a chance that you might find this game quite dull.
On the other hand, if you’re quite a curious person, and you have a bit of a perfectionist/completionist mentality mixed with a bit of an interest in philosophy I think this game could keep you engaged as it did with me.
The most enjoyable part of this game for me was figuring out how it worked. You start as one thing, and as you progress you can swap places with other things around you, smaller or bigger in size. You can shrink as small as atomic particles, and grow as large as galaxies. At a point, things loop, and from there it’s interesting navigating an infinitely looping world but trying to grasp how things connect.
The audio logs were interesting to find, but I found myself so distracted by the world that most of the time it was background noise. It’s a nice touch that once you’ve unlocked all the logs, you can play them back whenever you like, either one at a time or as a playlist. There were times I prefered the quiet, and others I wanted Alan to just natter away in my ear. I won’t lie to you and say I understood everything he says, it definitely gave me a bit of a “grandpa rambling in the corner of the room” vibe at times, but his voice is quite calming and he sounds passionate about what he has to say. It’s no doubt an interesting layer to the game and I don’t think it would be the same without it.
The game encourages you to think about life from another perspective. To take what you know and to question it and think about it from a different point of view. With that said, it does this in a very laid back, almost “zen” way.
This is a great game for zoning out and pondering, and that idea is backed up in the gameplay. There are a few features here that you can use to almost turn this game from an interactive experience into a moving screensaver.
When you progress far enough, you can group with other things, and then “dance”. The dancing is essentially a visualizer that will just loop and swirl on your screen until you stop “dancing”. You can also manually walk across the world, but you can also leave it on autopilot to just sit back and watch.
I found this game a lot of fun up until finding the last 2-3% of items. That is very much on me though and I totally expected to feel that way when I decided to commit to finding everything as there are 1,391 things in this game to find. You have to come up with a strategy for combing through each map variation, so this 100% is definitely not for the casual player.
Admittedly, I do think this process could have been more enjoyable the entire way through, if the space levels weren’t so vast and difficult to traverse, which made finding the space items feel like it pretty much halted progress. All of the other maps are a manageable size except the space ones. It makes sense logically, but, come on… If someone goes through the effort to 100% your game, I think it’s a little crappy to make the last few percentages a boring grind.
In terms of achievements, for the most part they aren’t that bad. The hardest achievements include one for finding all of the items and one for finding all of the items and getting all of the other achievements.
Despite the above, I still really enjoyed the game. I love the concept, in that it’s very chill, serious in part with the audio, but goofy in another with the visuals. It balances well and it’s enjoyable to just get lost, think and mess around in a sandbox-esque world. You can choose to respect the nature of things, or if you want, summon an army of turtles in space. Whatever you want, nothing is stopping you.
A quick heads-up for Steam Deck players, you will want to run the game with the Proton Experimental compatibility tool, otherwise the UI will be completely broken.
For more reviews of games with psychological, philosophical or thought-provoking themes, check out my curator page Psychology, Philosophy & Thought, where we review games that explore the mind, get you thinking or make you question.

An awesome game—the key word here is awe. Everything isn’t really a game so much as a philosophical playground. You drift through existence itself, becoming anything from an atom to a galaxy, watching the universe reveal its strange, recursive beauty. It’s trippy in the same way deep thinking gets trippy—when ideas start folding in on themselves and you realize you’re part of what you’re thinking about. The 66 Alan Watts recordings found in the game tie it all together, turning exploration into meditation.

If you love philosophy, scale, and that feeling of the sublime — being a grain of sand on an endless beach — then Everything is something you need to experience, not just play.

When I turned 6 years old, my grandma gave me an okapi plushie. An okapi is a type of ungulate that, despite the zebra-like stripes on its legs, is most closely related to giraffes. It's also the first thing I found in this game, which I don't think is a coincidence. Another thing that isn't a coincidence is the fact that this game is actually pretty eye-opening, and I highly recommend it for anyone who wants an existentialist experience. 10/10 would yap about my grandma again. I miss her.

Cool game, unique, but nothing to write home about. I enjoyed listening to some Alan Watts while playing but honestly, by the 10th hour, I was really out of it. Getting to 100% took time (especially The Big Thinker, holy moly) but progress can be made through play with some careful attention to using game mechanics when given the opportunity. Autoplay (in-game) can make some objectives easier.

I have never been more delighted and utterly confused at once while playing a video game. 11/10.
... In all seriousness, this is more an experience than a game, and as somebody with an interest in philosophy, the little anecdotes and audio lectures in this are amazing. It's a lot more than just 'haha you can be weird objects'.
Is it easy to potentially not get this game or miss the appeal? For sure. But I really like just messing around in it.
I got rejected by cinder blocks and screamed at by some french fries. Absolutely incredible experience.

I thought the tutorial was the entire game I got so confused when it said "Tutorial Complete" LOL
overall 10/10 experience so far

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☑ Good
☐ Decent
☐ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS
---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☑ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't
---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf
---{ Audience }---
☑ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☑ Grandma
---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☐ Potato
☑ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer
---{ Game Size }---
☐ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☑ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data
---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☑ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☐ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls
---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☑ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☐ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding
---{ Story }---
☐ No Story
☑ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life
---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☑ Average
☐ Long
☐ To infinity and beyond
---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☐ Worth the price
☑ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money
---{ Bugs }---
☑ Never heard of
☐ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs
---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
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☐ 10