There’s certainly nothing else quite like it. It’s a game that demands a particular mindset and a willingness to approach it on its own terms, but Everything is stunningly ambitious. Oh, and periodically you’ll stumble upon excerpts of talks by philosopher Alan Watts and listen to him discussing how all beings are related, and actually part of one huge organism. The other two titles in the top 5 list include the yearly. There are over a thousand objects in Everything, and you can control each of them in some manner. By comparison, Horizon Zero Dawn, despite getting rave reviews and a lot better than Wildlands sits at 3 with around 286k units sold. Maybe you’ll spend a few minutes as a cloud, or an island, or a single electron. What this means for you, the player? You’re put in control of an object-a cow, a bear, a pencil, a streetlamp, a cigarette butt, a grain of pollen-and can, at will, scale up into a larger one or down into a smaller one.

And one where everything is related to every other, where we’re defined by our similarities more than our differences. One that’ll be innately familiar to lovers of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, for instance-a world interconnected, a simulation of…well, everything. A game, sure, but also a way of looking at the universe, of understanding the world around us.

Best games of 2017 first half