The Everywhen appears to combine the structure of comparative mythology with the strange, tactile life of an old fireside tale
God of War: Laufey looks like a Joseph Campbell journey imagined inside Jim Henson’s Creature Shop.
That comparison goes beyond the presence of gods and monsters. Plenty of games borrow names, creatures and weapons from mythology. Laufey appears more interested in the way myths behave: the crossing of forbidden thresholds, the movement between life and death, the meeting of helpers and hostile powers, and the discovery that a small animal or enchanted object may understand the world better than its rulers.
The official premise is already mythically charged. Faye awakens after her funeral in the Everywhen, an afterlife where dead gods and creatures from different traditions coexist. All magic originates there and eventually returns to it, but that natural movement has been disrupted. Faye must survive hostile gods, escape imprisonment and find a way back to the family she died trying to protect. Santa Monica Studio describes the Everywhen as both the birthplace and endpoint of magic.
The result is more interesting than another tour through a new pantheon. The Greek and Norse eras were geographically and cosmologically distinct. The Everywhen allows those borders to collapse. Egyptian, Norse and Mongolian-Tibetan figures can now meet inside the same metaphysical system, alongside creatures native to the afterlife itself.
That gives Laufey two immediate strengths. Campbell helps us understand the shape of Faye’s journey. Henson helps us understand why its world already feels inhabited.
Campbell Beyond the Checklist
Joseph Campbell’s work is often reduced to the hero’s journey, which is then reduced again to a screenwriting template. A protagonist receives a call, refuses it, meets a mentor, crosses a threshold, survives an ordeal and returns transformed. This simplified version has become so familiar that it can make different stories look artificially identical.
Campbell’s original argument was broader. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, he used the term “monomyth,” borrowed from James Joyce, to describe recurring patterns found in heroic stories across many cultures. Interestingly, as the Joseph Campbell Foundation notes, the phrase “the hero’s journey” does not appear in the original book. Campbell wrote about hero-quests, transformations and journeys through worlds filled with unfamiliar but strangely recognisable forces.
His approach remains useful, provided it is treated as a lens rather than a universal law. Myths do share recurring situations: descent into an underworld, meetings with animal guides, encounters with threshold guardians, dangerous gifts, sacred weapons, death and return. They do not all mean the same thing, arise from the same history or place equal value on individual heroism. Comparative mythology becomes careless when resemblance is mistaken for identity.
Laufey seems well suited to a more flexible Campbellian reading. Faye begins after the threshold has already been crossed. She is dead before the adventure starts.
This changes the usual shape of the quest. She does not leave the ordinary world in search of danger. The ordinary world has already been taken from her. Her first problem is discovering what action remains possible after death. The Everywhen is therefore both an underworld and an unknown country, complete with its own creatures, laws and political struggles.
Faye soon encounters unusual companions. Phranque is a living cosmic cube with an earnest personality and a desire to protect the Everywhen’s creatures. Rue is an enchanted ribbon entrusted with guarding a devastating sword. Faye must earn Rue’s confidence before she can wield it. Sekhmet and Begtse stand among the hostile divine powers she will face.
The familiar mythic elements are present: descent, helpers, guardians, trials, a restricted weapon and the hope of return. Their arrangement is less conventional. Faye is a dead mother attempting to reach the living, not a young hero abandoning home to discover herself. Her journey grows from responsibility rather than restlessness.
That distinction matters. In the Norse games, Faye shaped events through her absence. Her death sent Kratos and Atreus on their journey, while her plans continued to guide them. Laufey turns that absence into a place. Death becomes geography, and the woman who once organised the story from beyond its frame finally enters the centre.
What Henson Understood About Myth
Campbell explains the broad structure. Jim Henson explains the texture.
The Storyteller adapted European folk tales through narration, live performance, puppetry, animatronics and practical creature effects. Its later Greek Myths series brought the same method to stories including Orpheus and Eurydice, Perseus and the Minotaur. The Jim Henson Company describes the programmes as a meeting of ancient tradition, literary writing and the technical artistry of the Creature Shop. That mixture is precisely what made the series distinctive.
The tales did not feel like polished summaries of folklore. They felt handled, worn and lived in. Monsters occupied physical rooms. Animals interrupted important conversations. Kings could be absurd, frightening or both. Magic gathered around bowls, fires, feathers, bones and pieces of string. The narrator sat beside a hearth while his dog questioned the story, complained about its logic and kept the supernatural anchored to ordinary domestic life.
Henson understood that myths need bodies. A creature must appear capable of becoming hungry, frightened, wounded or cold. An object must feel touched before it can feel sacred. Wonder becomes more convincing when it shares a room with dirt, smoke, discomfort and sadness.
That quality runs through the Laufey reveal. The trailer does not rely entirely on famous gods. Its strongest images may be the smaller ones: a curious red-and-blue animal approaching Faye, a winged foxlike creature, a horned child in a cage and a heavy grey beast lying dead in a pen.
These images do not pause to explain themselves. They work because their meaning is partly visible in their condition. Some creatures are free. Some are captive. Some have been killed. Others appear to have been enlarged and turned into instruments of divine power.
The Everywhen consequently feels less like a crossover arena than a damaged habitat.
The Creatures Tell the Story
The small red-and-blue animal appears to be native to the Everywhen. It is gecko-like in its face and movement, but its posture and enormous tail also suggest a squirrel or other alert climbing mammal. It does not need a name borrowed from an existing myth to be effective. Its behaviour tells us that the Everywhen has an ecology beyond gods, armies and boss encounters.
There is a faint functional resemblance to Ratatoskr, the squirrel that moves along Yggdrasil carrying messages between the creatures above and below. That does not make this animal Ratatoskr. The comparison simply helps explain the appeal of small, quick creatures in cosmological settings. They travel where larger beings cannot and often know more than their apparent importance would suggest.
The larger winged fox belongs to a more overtly supernatural category. Fox spirits such as the Japanese kitsune and Chinese huli jing are associated with intelligence, transformation and movement between human and spiritual worlds. Wings intensify that sense of passage. This creature appears built to cross boundaries, which would make it valuable in an afterlife whose normal routes have been obstructed.
Its design may also draw upon the qilin or Bai Ze: auspicious East Asian creatures associated respectively with omens and knowledge of the supernatural. It is unlikely to be a literal reproduction of any one of them. Santa Monica seems to be combining recognisable qualities—foxlike intelligence, celestial movement, spiritual knowledge—into an original Everywhen animal.
Henson often worked in a similar register. His creatures rarely looked like illustrations copied from a bestiary. They felt assembled from several half-remembered traditions, then given posture, temperament and appetite. The important question was not simply what species they belonged to, but how they behaved once they entered the room.
The dead grey creature in the pen is more disturbing. Its heavy body and soft, tapir-like face invite comparison with the baku, the Japanese nightmare-eater derived from earlier Chinese traditions. Traditional baku combine features from several animals and were invoked as protection against nightmares and malicious spirits. LACMA describes the baku as a benevolent creature known in Japan by the fifteenth century.
If the animal is baku-inspired, its death suggests more than cruelty. A creature responsible for consuming nightmares has itself died in captivity. The system that should process fear, dreams and psychic disturbance is no longer working. The Everywhen may be politically unstable, but it also appears spiritually sick.
The horned boy develops the same idea. Goat horns evoke Pan, satyrs and fauns; antlers suggest figures such as Cernunnos. The boy need not be any of them. His function is immediately legible: he represents some small, vulnerable part of the wild that has been placed behind bars.
The cage turns mythological curiosity into moral information. Whoever governs this part of the Everywhen does not merely fight rival gods. They capture the creatures beneath them.
Divine Violence at Scale
Sekhmet reveals the other side of this system. In Egyptian religion, she embodies war, plague, healing and the destructive heat of the sun. Her lioness form already joins divine and animal power. The enormous feline associated with her in the trailer appears to enlarge that symbolism into something closer to a mount, fortress or siege engine.
If the creature is genuinely six-legged, its surplus anatomy makes the intention even clearer. An ordinary lion is a predator. A gigantic lion with extra limbs has left nature behind. It has become a military construction.
Begtse introduces a related but more complicated form of divine violence. He is a wrathful protector in Vajrayana Buddhism and became particularly important in Mongolia, where he was revered as a martial guardian. His terrifying imagery does not make him a simple god of evil. Wrathful protectors use frightening forms to destroy obstacles and defend religious teachings. The Rubin Museum identifies Begtse as one of the principal protectors of the Geluk school.
His hostility toward Faye may therefore arise from his role as a guardian. She has awakened after death and entered a realm she should apparently be unable to leave. To a divine protector, she may look like a rupture in the structure he has sworn to defend.
This ambiguity gives the conflict more depth. A protector becomes indistinguishable from a jailer when the people inside are forbidden to leave.
Objects With Personalities
Phranque and Rue make the Henson comparison even stronger because neither begins as a conventional character. One is a cube; the other is a ribbon. Both have names, personalities and responsibilities.
A cube implies order, containment and stability. Phranque turns those abstract qualities into a companion. His geometric body may be comic, but his role is serious: he protects both his friends and the creatures of the Everywhen. In a realm where magic has lost its natural direction, a living shape may function as an anchor, map or surviving piece of the world’s original order.
Rue performs a different task. Ribbons, knots and cords can bind, seal, consecrate or restrain. Rue guards a weapon powerful enough to become disastrous in the wrong hands. She is the rule surrounding the sword.
The weapon itself draws upon several familiar traditions. It recalls Excalibur when access depends on worthiness, Freyr’s sword if it possesses some degree of independent power, and cursed weapons such as Tyrfing if drawing it carries a terrible cost. The Buddhist sword of Mañjuśrī offers another possibility: a blade whose purpose is to cut through ignorance and illusion rather than merely flesh.
No single identification is necessary. The important idea is that Faye’s sword cannot be separated from the judgment of its guardian. Rue turns the weapon from equipment into a relationship. Power must be negotiated with the being responsible for containing it.
That is pure Storyteller: a ribbon can speak, a cube can worry, a fox can know the road and a sword can refuse the wrong hand. Mythic worlds become persuasive when agency is distributed beyond the obvious heroes.
Structure and Texture
Campbell and Henson are especially useful together because each corrects a weakness in the other.
Campbell’s comparative method makes it possible to recognise large patterns across cultures. It can also flatten those cultures when every god, monster and ritual is treated as another version of the same universal symbol. Sekhmet and Begtse come from different religious histories. A kitsune is not a qilin. Pan is not Cernunnos. Their similarities can produce illuminating comparisons, but they do not erase their differences.
Henson’s approach returns myth to particular bodies, voices and places. His creatures were not interchangeable representatives of “the animal guide.” They limped, sulked, lied, laughed and occupied specific rooms. Texture resisted abstraction.
The Everywhen will succeed if it maintains that balance. Its premise gives Santa Monica access to an extraordinary range of traditions, but it also creates the risk of reducing them to a collection of striking designs. The gods must retain the histories and contradictions that made them compelling before they entered the game. Their creatures must feel like inhabitants rather than assets selected from a mythological catalogue.
The reveal is promising because it pays attention to condition as well as appearance. It asks whether a creature is free, frightened, imprisoned, dead or weaponised. Those distinctions give the world an ethical structure before its lore has been fully explained.
A Story After Death
Faye is the right protagonist for this kind of story because she has already occupied the strange space between presence and absence.
In God of War and Ragnarök, her influence survived her body. She was remembered through stories, markings, prophecies and the decisions she had made before her death. Kratos and Atreus travelled through a world she had quietly prepared for them.
Laufey reverses that relationship. Faye now travels through the world beyond death while trying to preserve the lives continuing without her. She is simultaneously the lost parent, the returning warrior and the dead person refusing to become merely a memory.
Campbell gives us a way to recognise the shape of that journey: descent, trial, assistance, transformation and possible return. Henson gives us a reason to care about the world surrounding it: the little animal near Faye’s feet, the child behind bars, the dead creature in the straw, the ribbon protecting a sword.
One approach supplies the map. The other reminds us to look into the corners of the room.
That is the promise of God of War: Laufey. Its mythology may be vast enough to connect many pantheons, but its success will depend on smaller things: whether its creatures appear to have lives, whether its objects seem to remember who touched them and whether the Everywhen feels like a place where stories have accumulated rather than a stage built to display references.
Campbell can explain why Faye must cross the realm of death.
Henson can explain why the fox matters.