Everything lets you control galaxies, bears, and single cells—and it's now out on PC

Everything is perhaps the only game in which you can control the movements of a huge star within its solar system one minute and a school of fish cutting through the shallows of a pond the next. Creator David O'Reilly calls it an "interactive nature simulator", which only goes part of the way to explaining what is actually is.

It's a game in which you control, well, everything. At a tap of a button you can move wistfully up and down levels of complexity, shifting landscapes, animals, and planets as you please. You can uproot groups of trees, create islands in the ocean, guide flocks of birds, or scuttle around in the dirt as a bug. It's mind-boggling.

It looks pretty stunning, too, and it's all set to gentle piano music that puts me in mind of the Minecraft soundtrack, punctuated by bouts of philosophical narration that sit somewhere between David Attenborough and Carl Sagan.

It's been out on consoles for a month already (boo), but it's now arrived on Steam, and might be worth checking out.

One of the most eye-catching things about it is the way that the animals in the game move. Most of them don't have any real animations — instead they stiffly roll around head over heels, gradually picking up friends as they go. Before you know it, you've got a herd of giraffes all doing roly polys across a dessert.

If that prospect alone doesn't have you hooked, then there's a 20% discount for the next week, bringing the price down to £8.79/$11.99.

"Everything is a very different kind of game, and people will interpret it differently," David O'Reilly said on the game's new Steam page. "But the best thing is to go in without any expectations. One thing to keep in mind is that there's no wrong way to play it — it's all designed so you can't make a mistake."

Check out a gameplay video below, and let me know what you think in the comments.

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.