Well, last week’s Epic Games store article was a mess. Not because I had a mess to fix once I had workmen round to fit a new kitchen; it was what followed that which was the complete and utter mess. Six games with six grown men in tights growling grimly at colorful men and Catwoman’s breasts. It was like a mid-2000s wrestling match just without the white rapper winning all the time. So let’s calm down a little from that and do a semi-review of Everything. As I said last week, this is not the entirety of the storefront; it is David O’Reilly’s Everything.

Everything is a strange game about the universe with small segments of philosophy from Alan Watts. Overall it is a perfectly fine artsy game with a major glaring flaw in the center of it. As the title suggests you can play as many different things, not everything. Though, I doubt you can play as a manic-depressive Chechnyan man who works in a store stacking shelves by day, and by night, works in a gay bar doing illicit acts for five dollars a pop to keep his family afloat. This isn’t a playable character in any video game; but particularly, not in this one. That being said, you can play as about three-thousand different things in Everything.

The problem with that is, much like me last week, the developer cut some corners when it comes to some portions of the game. When you play as a rock or pebble, the animations work as they are fully animated and move like rocks would roll and tumble. Microorganisms or anything as small as that float around as if they make up everything, which elements like hydrogen pretty much do. Plants and other objects such as crystals will grow and plant themselves across the mass of whatever you are on.

The glaring issue is after you get up to galaxies (or go down because the universe is a loop), they float around and do as galaxies do. Everything smaller than a chimp and larger than a planet animates fairly well, but when you are a cow or camel there are a total of four frames of animation. On your face, bumhole, back, or legs are the only frames you get. It’s quite jarring to have a simple armadillo skitter and then suddenly a pack of cows come rolling through on their face.

It is especially jarring when you think of an Alan Watts lecture playing, which gives it a hint of gravitas, but it looks like a child spent five nanoseconds in Unity creating the cow animation. It is a fascinating game with some of the worst animation of cows, goats, those horses with the black and white stripes that some idiots call “a zed-bra,” and Mammuthus primigenius. It’s still worth picking up.

Speaking of picking up something slightly wrong, Metro: 2033 Redux is a game about some people living in the underground of Moscow because that pesky apocalypse has appeared again. You know it is Russia because it is depressing, and if it was in the London Tube it would just be several people tutting because the public transport is off service. As far as a turn of the decade shooter goes, Metro is strangely one of the few I’d suggest to almost anyone. It is a shooter that isn’t about racism, aside from the wide range of quality in the accents, and the things you do shoot are cosmic horrors from some Chernobyl fever dreams.

You play as Artyom, a lovely young man who can see the unearthly horrors brought to the world via all-out nuclear war and the release of every Bloodborne nightmare you’ve had onto Moscow. Though our Artyom is a bit of a quiet lad, he’ll only speak when no one else is around, so mostly in load screens. I know if I saw even half of what he did I’d be screaming so many obscenities, that the ESRB would slap me with M rating quicker than you’d be able to pronounce Glukhovsky. I’d never be allowed on Twitch again.

The thing is, Metro as a series isn’t very much to write home about. Everything has more brown on it than a sewage inspector’s boots; the game is so melancholy and bleak that it is hard to make this bit funny when there’s a starving child in every station licking the walls. However, that’s what makes everyone seem human, there is a sense of struggle and a willingness to keep going. Sure there might be mold forming on everything, including the people, but they desire to live on through it. It’s the type of game that could feature philosophy and not have a clown burst dancing on its face.

Both Everything and Metro: 2033 Redux are free until Thursday the 3rd of October. On the third, we’re getting a very very calm week where we’re stuck in a 60 second loop wherein we explore and try to beat Minit in a minute.

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