PlayStation 4 Game 'Everything' Lets You Play As... Everything
“A game in which everything you see is a playable character.”
Known primarily for his short films, Ireland-born, Los Angeles-based artist David O’Reilly is no stranger to video games: he created all of the video game sequences for Spike Jonze’s 2013 flick Her. But now the Kilkenny-bred O’Reilly is taking on a full-fledged, playable game with the upcoming Everything. A unique take on the typical gameplay experience, Everything — introduced today on the PlayStation Blog — “is a game in which everything you see is a playable character.” As a result, the game is infinitely playable and allows players to experience the same world through seemingly countless points of view.
Check out the trailer above and look for Everything to be available exclusively for PlayStation 4 sometime later this year. O’Reilly’s own introduction to the game appears below while fans can follow along with its development over on Twitter.
I have been working on a new project for a long time with some very talented people, and I’m excited about sharing it with you today.
In Everything, every single thing is a playable character; if you can see it, you can be it. The game lets you see the entire universe from the point of view of the thousands of things in it. In other words, there is no distinction between you and the world, or between a level and a character. All these things experience and interact with the world differently.
Everything lets you be anything you want. If you ever wanted to see what it’s like to be a horse, or a paperclip, or the sun, this is for you. Your main power in the game is Being (there are more but I won’t ruin the surprise).
This very simple idea has involved years of research and development, as virtually all game engines expect a lot of things to be static and non interactive. I should mention that I’m still quite new to this, and though I was very excited about this idea, I had no clue how backwards it was or how much work it would be. Together with Damien DiFede (who writes all of the code) we developed an entirely new way to create and design levels, which treat objects more like ecosystems, and slightly closer to how they would be in nature.
Everything is a game about the things we see, their relationships, and their points of view. In this context, things are how we separate reality so we can understand it and talk about it with each other. It sounds obvious, but people have been arguing about what things are since the dawn of time. This was the subject of my last game Mountain, and Everything explores this idea and more in much greater depth, and in a much more fun way.
Everything is launching exclusively on PS4 in the future (As soon as we finish it!).
