Mountain Creator Announces He's Making... Everything
Something
Working with Double Fine, David OReilly has announced his next project following 2014's RPS-adored Mountain. And it's called Everything [official site]. And appears to be promising... everything. A game in which you can play as everything in the game.
Announced as a PS4 exclusive, we poked Double Fine with the patented Rock, Paper, Shotgun Really Pointy Stick (RPSRPS) until they confessed that "exclusive" means "for a bit", and that it will be coming to PC some time after the dangerously angular console. There are details and a trailer below.
OReilly is probably most famous for creating those gorgeous projected 3D gaming sequences in the fabulous film Her. But to us he will always be That Guy Who Gave Us Mountain. His next game is something much more ambitious.
The concept is a little huge to get one's head around. It seems that in Everything, absolutely everything is a playable character. So if it exists in the game, it's something you can play as. It's an attempt to let you see the game's world from every possible perspective. As OReilly puts it in a PlayStation Blog post:
"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."
Here's a trailer to confuse you further:
Apparently the mystical arts of game engines don't expect games to be built this way, so along with coder Damien DiFede, he's had to create a new way to design levels, which he explains "treat objects more like ecosystems, and slightly closer to how they would be in nature." In fact, let me quote-dump so you can get the best possible description of what this hopes to be:
"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."
There's no release date yet, and we are assured that the PS4 is getting first dibs for an unspecified length of time. Sony tend to be the least worst at such exclusives, so it could be as little as a month. Let's hope it's not more, for the sake of the game's sales.