Shia LeBeouf may claim that we cannot be divided, but maybe we’ve always fought and separated from one another. And at the same time, maybe that is part of a larger, harmonious system that we cannot see from our point of view … or, at least, that’s what I think I got from the trailer for the upcoming game Everything.
On March 21, developer David O’Reilly will release Everything for PlayStation 4 for $15 before the game hits PC and Mac on April 21. Everything is the result of three years of development, and it empowers players to explore existence at various scales by warping into various creatures, plants, and more.
To give players an idea of what to expect, O’Reilly released a gameplay trailer today that starts with a bear somersaulting absurdly through a wilderness environment, but it quickly turns profound as philosopher Alan Watts puts words to what is happening on screen in a voice-over track. From the bear, we see a cursor move around and select a bird and then the camera shifts to the fowl’s smaller point of view. Next, the cursor selects grass, then a clover, and on down to microorganisms. Later in the video, the game scales up until you are playing as an entire galaxy.
“When we examine our bloodstreams under a microscope, we see there’s one hell of a fight going on,” Watts says in audio from his How Could This Happen To Me? lecture. “All sorts of microorganisms are chewing each other up. And if we got overly fascinated with our view of our own bloodstreams in the microscope, we should start taking sides — which would be fatal. Because the health of our organism depends on the continuance of this battle. What is in other words conflict at one level of magnification is harmony at a higher level. Could it possibly be therefore that we — with all our problems, conflicts, neurosiss, sicknesses, political outrages, wars, tortures, and everything that goes on in human life — are a state of conflict which can be seen in a larger perspective as a situation of harmony?”
It’s a powerful idea, and one that Everything brings to life through gameplay. And it makes for a haunting game trailer as well.