Everywhere is a game that desperately tries to be everything. It’s not the crypto fever dream earlier reports would have you believe, a point creative director Leslie Benzies is very eager to stress as we tour the studio and catch a glimpse at its ambitious production. But even with this denial of its more sinister intentions, the metaversal scope and high budgets of this unfettered live-service experiment is equal parts impressive and baffling. It invites us into an ever-changing world that can host multiple games’ worth of content, live concerts, huge tournaments, and a suite of creative tools that over the years players can use to eventually take ownership of a digital landscape to rival even Fortnite or Roblox.
But I have to ask whether it can justify its existence in a landscape where similar platforms already exist, and whether in its drive to appeal to everyone it will alienate itself until it is nowhere, with nothing to offer and nobody playing. Its relatively generic and inclusive presentation - a word which is thrown at me so many times during my visit to the studio that it soon lost all meaning - also doesn’t inspire much confidence, with most of the characters and biomes ripe with a corporate veneer that goes against the desire for user-created majesty that developer Build A Rocket Boy hinges its success on. There’s a lot of variables which need to be perfect in their execution for Everywhere to have a chance at stealing the show, and I’m not yet sold.
Apparently it’s not a metaverse, or at least Benzies cast aside that genre descriptor as I asked him whether it can be considered alongside its contemporaries. He believes it to be something more, an experience capable of taking video games to new heights through its combination of curated, high-budget gameplay and user-created content. Utropia sits at the centre of this vision. It’s described as a social hub situated in the midst of Everywhere’s open world where players can jump through portals into new levels, chat with friends, or put personal touches on their characters and vehicles. It’s fast, yet also rather old-fashioned and tedious in how you must run between different facilities to perform basic gameplay functions instead of, I dunno, opening a menu. It wants to be innovatively futuristic even when all they showed me reminded me of a weird cancelled sequel to PlayStation Home. I was shown so much and promised the moon with Everywhere, and I still walked away having no idea what exactly its endgame really is, nor where it hopes to begin capturing attention of people who will have a hard time walking away from platforms that already do this stuff better.
Utropia is split into four districts - Combat, Racing, Entertainment, and The Collection. Most of these are self-explanatory, while The Collection is a place where you can purchase items or levels known as ARCs (user-generated content, so why are they called that?) which can be added to your inventory and used to complement your own creations or merely have fun with. I was told these are bought through in-game currency and potentially a premium alternative, although the studio wasn’t ready to talk about the economy despite the entire game hinging on how it operates. Is this free-to-play totally-not-a-metaverse platform hoping to follow the Roblox model of earning a cut of player earnings, or use creator codes similarly to Fortnite? It doesn’t seem to possess a reliance on cosmetic skins and similar unlockables for its economy either, so I am once again left with more questions than answers. Just what exactly is this thing?
Lots of attention is paid to the ease of use associated with its creation tools, and how almost anyone can jump into Everywhere, follow its tutorials, and piece together levels that could rival the biggest games on the planet. Yet this suffers from the same pitfalls as something like Dreams. Its potential is limited by how creators take to it, and often attention can be kept to those who are smart and patient enough to embrace its potential. Many of us have stared in awe at gorgeous recreations of classic ideas in Media Molecule’s gem, but how many of us have bothered to purchase the game and take it for a spin ourselves? Herein lies the problem, and Everywhere will need to figure this out or falter at the gates.
Oh, and there’s also a standalone triple-A game known as MindsEye which will be available exclusively through Everywhere. This looks nothing like Utropia or the super duper inclusive aesthetic found within the foundational open world, and is more akin to a curated narrative blockbuster like The Last of Us or Detroit: Become Human. We’re shown a lavishly produced cutscene and small slivers of gameplay which seem to paint MindsEye as a big-budget epic, an assumption which is compounded further when Benzies then describes it as an episodic endeavour which will eventually incorporate multiplayer and a solo campaign. So what even is it then? We didn’t even know if it will be sold as a premium product within the confines of Everywhere or merely act as a bargaining chip to pull players into the ecosystem. It seems their visual and mechanical ideas are divergent enough that combining both of them into the tools players are given to create their own content would be a discordant nightmare.
MindsEye doesn’t look especially original, with its concept seemingly revolving around an android who isn’t aware of his synthetic identity as he teams up with unlikely human allies before fighting back against evil corporations. The cutscene I was shown had a maniacal scientist inject our protagonist with a strange serum all while asking him if he recognises a portable radio held in his captor’s other hand, because they’re related, apparently. We have seen these themes explored elsewhere, and I’m unsure whether Everywhere will put more eyes on MindsEye or doom it to relative obscurity. It’s all just so weird, and I can’t tell if it’s because of an innovation so alien I can’t understand it, or if the whole thing is a bad idea.
Everywhere has so much potential, talent, and money behind it, but it’s hard to tell right now if any of that is currently applied in the right ways. Build A Rocket Boy invited us along to its studio to clear up messaging around its live-service game and in doing so only left me more confused than before. It wants to do everything, but it doesn’t stand a chance unless it nails the fundamentals its competitors have been lauding over our heads for the better part of a decade.
Leslie Benzies is one of the key minds behind Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption, whose ambition can definitely be felt here, but unfortunately Everywhere is so unfocused and so desperate to change the world that I’m concerned nobody will even bother to care.