Equal parts silly and thought-provoking.

I thought this was game was just going to be T-posing animals tumbling around a world making random sound effects. And it is definitely that.

What I was not expecting was a series of audio logs with genuinely interesting lectures from philosopher Alan Watts.
Honestly that sounds incredibly boring on paper but that mixed in with the goofy gameplay that had me constantly ascending and descending looking for new random Things to possess kept me engaged for hours.

My biggest complaint really is that the trophies and objects are intentionally ambiguous as heck. Including how to find your way to the end of the game.

+ Fun to explore and find new things to posses
+ Goofy gameplay and writing that got a few chuckles from me
+ Surprisingly thought-provoking audio tapes

- Difficult to find your way to game ending spot
- Obtuse trophy descriptions
- Gameplay eventually got stale before I had finished the audio tapes resulting in a bit of grind

Ok so I already wrote down what I thought about the game, but I need to expand on it because I've been playing 3 hours straight since I was "done" with it.

The value that you can find in a game like this lies squarely in whether you agree, or share similar feelings, as those expressed by Alan Watts and whether you think O'Reilly successfully recreated them. Like most holistic thinkers that attempt to find answers to questions that can't really be answered, I think the man had interesting intuitions, and in many regards, he's more charming than most thinkers of today, but he's also pretty quaint in his views on how we are all connected and seems to carefully omit himself from saying more subversive things in these talks. Maybe that's a problem whit the game itself, or maybe I'm just hearing these speeches way too out of context. At any rate, the game is cute, and certainly enjoyable, and I would recommend playing it for the way that it lets you travel through one sphere of existence to another alone. The sheer scale that that traversing evokes is well worth the play.
That being aside, the latter half of the game will devolve irrevocably into a collect-a-thon that will most surely hook you if you're receptive to that kind of thing. I'm not so sure this is what Watts was thinking about when he did his lectures. But in a way, it's a pretty insightful commentary on how easily we can reduce complex topics into a clicker game.

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Ya había escrito sobre este juego y pensaba que no tendría que decir nada más, pero resulta que acabo de hacer tres horas seguidas de Everything y necesito añadir un par de cosas.

El valor que puedes encontrar en un juego como éste radicará en que estés de acuerdo o compartas ideas similares a las expresados por Alan Watts, y si crees que O'Reilly las está recreando con éxito. Como muchos pensadores holísticos que intentan encontrar respuestas a preguntas que realmente no pueden responderse, creo que el señor tenía intuiciones interesantes y, en muchos aspectos, es más fascinante que la mayoría de los intelectuales contemporáneos. Pero también me resulta simplón en su manera de insistir en nuestras conexiones, y parece evitar profundizar en detalles más subversivos. Tal vez el juego en sí las está caracterizando mal, o tal vez las estoy escuchando fuera de su contexto. En cualquier caso, el juego es lindo y ciertamente divertido, y recomendaría jugarlo por la forma en que te hace viajar de una esfera de la existencia a otra. La enormidad que evoca ese recorrido bien vale la pena experimentarla.

Habiendo dicho eso, la segunda mitad del juego involuciona hacia un juego de coleccionar cosas que va a apelar a tus instintos más depravados. Dudo mucho que este horror vacui fuese el que Watts tenía pensado cuando impartió sus lecturas, pero dice mucho de nuestra manera de diseñar que sus ideas y pensamientos puedan ser reducidas tan groseramente a hacer muchos clicks.

Im a simple man.

I see a game with Alan Watts, I give a 5/5.

Do yourself a favor and do the same.

I enjoy a good walking simulator, so it's weird for me to say that I think walking simulator type games have a bit of a soft ceiling on how "good" they can be (conversely I also think they have a pretty hard floor, it's difficult to make a truly terrible one) - you truly have to be exceptional in every way in order to achieve a very high rating. And this game is only exceptional in some ways.

That's a bit of a weird statement to just say. I mean that this game has a very interesting philosophy behind it and excels at being an art project. Alan Watts' commentary is very welcome and feels appropriate as you explore the concept of Everything (though it kind of manifests as the concept of scale). Where I struggle is that the game presents itself as very vast and large, but doesn't much actually feel that way. The main part of the gameplay is introduced as "the tutorial" but there's really not much left to do other than fill out this game's equivalent of the bestiary and crash your game with disasters (which is admittedly fun, for a bit) afterwards. And by the time you get to that point it feels like it's trying to be deeper than it really is.

It's a great art project. Pick this game up when it's on steep discount some time and play it for a bit. It's a great 2.5 hours if you're into surreal experiences. But there's not much longevity beyond that, despite how vast the game might seem.

"Think of your many years of procrastination, and how you've always been granted more and more time of which you never took advantage.

It's time to realize the nature of the world to which you belong - to understand that you have a time limit and it's running out.

So use it to advance your enlightenment or it will be gone forever!"

-clump of grass

3 AM, take your substance of choice to abuse, sit back in the dark, do not listen to music, don't have a youtube video on in the background. learn about some microbes. This game is very relaxing and quite informative as it features, well, everything, and it has explanations of all the objects from wikipedia I believe, so you can kinda just sit there and possess and object and then once you have it in your little encyclopedia, you can check it out and learn something that you'll probably forget because if you followed my instructions you're shitfaced. But hey, it was a TOTAL trip.