Full Review with Links and Example: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1xbk9aUT92MxTH_ryAP7cBFq8q5fp-qA_/view?usp=sharing

Full Text Review:

The best way to describe Everhood is to use its own words. “Many words have been said. Some thoughts have been shared.” These are some of the very last lines in the game, in what is supposed to be an emotional and meaningful sendoff to the player. As you can guess by these insipid, passive lines, the sendoff is anything but.

Everhood is a rare and spectacular beast; it sets out to accomplish many things and manages to fail to accomplish even one. From its characters to its story, art, gameplay, music, to every single aspect of its existence as a game, Everhood fails to create a fun, comprehensible, or even just competent experience. It tries to take rhythm games, Undertale, and old style weird and mash them together without understanding how any of them function alone, let alone combined.

Before I go deeper in, I will admit that yes, I am salty. I am salty not because the game is bad but because it could have been good. Everhood has occasional moments of absolute brilliance. I am talking ‘10/10 would have been the next big indie’ level of brilliance. This fight showcases how good the game could have been. The tracker is a total banger, the chart makes sense, the visuals are entertaining (the horns, the shadow puppets; it is all so perfect). That is what the game had the potential to be throughout. It is not. The amount of potential the developers squandered with terrible ideas and implementation stings all the harder when you see what they were capable of doing.

For the first half of the game, the story is near incomprehensible. You go to a series of disjointed locations and meet the same characters in each and do random actions until you complete the area. Near the end of this section, the game tries to have a meta commentary about meaning and purpose of progression in games, but it feels like an excuse for the cluster disaster of a plot you stumble through. The second half of the game is just an Undertale rip-off. Full stop. This may be somewhat mean, but this clip from Billy Madison is the best way of describing the first half of the game.

The Undertale rip-off could have worked if you liked or even gave half a damn about the characters. But the game fails to give you a reason to care about them. You are introduced to the entire cast at the beginning of the game, and they show up in every area for the first half. They have no purpose, and 1-2 lines each in every area. They barely play a part in story and are generally entirely ignorable. I can describe most of the cast in one to two words. “Depressed, Sneezes”, “Laser Squidward”, “Changes Names”. Those are the entire characters for some of what you might consider “the main cast”. There is so little to the characters that when it becomes to make THE BIG CHOICE, you do not care. Should they live? Should they die? Who cares? The game has given you no reason give a single damn about any of them. It never introduces characters, gives them a time to shine, or ever lets them do anything. You could remove almost every NPC from the game and you probably would not notice.

The combat is like a rhythm game but not. Enemies attack to the music and you must dodge their attack notes. The attack notes come down in the five lanes and you must dodge them. The first problem comes from the fact that the enemies act to the music, which means by the time you are reacting to their attacks, the music has moved on. You do not act to the music nor the beat. One of the fundamental joys of games that involve music, interacting with the music, is not present. There is a disconnect between the player’s action and the music. The game makes you feel like you want to move to the beat and dodge to the music, but it does not let you.

The second problem comes from the existence of five lanes. Notes DO NOT spill across all the lanes, forcing you constantly dodge and weave across all five to survive. No, they flood down 2-3 lanes while leaving the rest bare. Much of the combat devolves into parking in one of the safe lanes and waiting. It trivializes much of the game.

The second half of the game introduces an active element to the combat: You can absorb colored notes. Absorbing two of the same color in a row lets you shoot it back to do damage. On its face, this sounds interesting and fun. It lets the player aggressively go through beatmaps and rewards them with damage. However, the mechanic is hindered by a series of bad decisions. Absorbing different colored attacks cancels the combo. You must absorb two of the same in a row. But there is little rhyme or reason for what color notes are or where they are placed. It leads to hunting down colors or accidentally cancelling your combo, which really sucks. In addition, your attacks get cancelled out if they hit two note attacks or a wall note. Enemy note attacks appear around 1s before they hit you, and your attack has travel time. This leads to the common case of your attack getting cancelled out after you fired it when the lane was completely clear when you fired it. This quickly becomes extraordinarily aggravating.

In the battle sequences, the game tries to give character to the NPCs by having them do silly animations and say things while fighting. The problem is that due to the ‘dodge the beatmap’ design of the game, the player’s focus is solely on the bottom half of the screen. Anything that is not notes, your character, or the lanes is unimportant and thus ignored. I cannot read text while doing this. I will barely even see the text box. I did not even notice half the entertaining little things the cursor did during the fight until I watched the video example I posted above. You tunnel vision to only see the information that is pertinent to the fast-paced gameplay, you cannot focus and enjoy those animations because that will get you killed.

Let us use Undertale as an example. There is a ton going on here. Sans’ dialog, the text box dialog, animations, all sorts of non-gameplay information that the player should be paying attention to. But none of it happens during the combat gameplay. The player is not expected to pay attention to both aspects because the player cannot pay attention to both aspects at the same time. You get the full experience because you are given the opportunity to fully process everything Sans says and does without having to focus on dodging his attacks. In games like this, you must separate the gameplay and the story so the player can adequately focus on each without reducing the other. Everhood does not do this, leading to a reduced experience for both.

Musically, the game has over 100 songs, heavily trading quality for quantity. The OST dabbles in all kinds of genres and ideas, leaving it without any kind of unifying theme, idea, or even a leitmotif. In a game where the music should be a key part in characterization and storytelling, there is only ‘meh’. It does not even use its musical ideas to try and enhance scenes and characters. Many scenes and areas have no music at all. There are a few great songs, but they are extremely few and far between. The music is rarely good or used to accent or improve the game.
Most of the tracks are barely developed. It is as if the developers decided that if it took 10 of effort to make 1 good song, then they could make 10 songs with that same amount of effort if they only did 1/10th of each. It leads to many songs and fights being like this. I love the Spanish guitar and was entirely hyped for the fight. But there is no real fight, and there is no real song. They have an opening chord and nothing more. These songs are cardboard cutouts of real music with nothing behind them. It is incredibly disappointing when some of them could have been something if there was more substance to them.

As a side note, the sfx are generally ear grating, and I cannot recommend turning them down enough. They are extremely bad, loud, and get in the way of the tracks during fights. Just listen to the shooting sfx during the cursor fight example.

On the side of difficulty, the game tries to go for the RPG ‘tweak the numbers’ approach in a game about dodging rhythm game charts. The harder a difficulty, the less hp and the more your enemies have. The reverse is true for easier difficulties. This system does not work for games that use rhythm mechanics. If you are struggling with a fight, turning down the difficulty may make it easier to facetank your way through, but you just fail your way to victory. The reason rhythm games’ easier difficulties are easier charts is to enable players with a lower skill level to not only complete levels but feel like doing so is still an accomplishment.

If I turn down the difficulty in Everhood, I will still face the same chart that may have reamed me, but now I have enough hp to just stand still and take every hit without losing. Failing my way to victory does not feel good. It does not feel like I accomplished anything.

An expert may do something like this and feel accomplished: Example (Hard)

But a novice can still do the same song/level/what have you on an easier difficulty and still feel accomplished because it was tailored for their skill level: Example (Easy)

Imagine if all the players were forced to do the hard version, but the game just ignored all your mess ups if you were playing on an easier mode. That is not rewarding.

Art-wise, the game takes a very minimalistic approach. There are few details or sprites. Most of the screen is black. The screen beyond the playable area is also black. This leads to many situations where the player does not know whether they have hit an invisible wall or is moving forward, which gets old real fast. There is nothing wrong with a minimalistic art style, but almost all non-portrait sprites that are there are bad. It is a shame because the artist has talent. Red’s combat sprite is great. The portrait pictures are generally great. But nearly every other sprite and area in the game is either garish or just bad looking. I do not mean ugly. Ugly characters can look good. (See Flan’s portrait. He is ugly. but his portrait looks good.). It is that the spriting is bad. Mild spoilers, but this is how bad they look.

I admit, when I said the game failed to accomplish a single thing it set out to do, I lied. The game accomplished one idea that is obviously a key design tenant: to waste the player’s time. It drags out every section with extended transition screens lasting upwards of 10-15 seconds each. A shoutout goes to the end of the game where they have you wait on a black screen for over 40 seconds while nothing happens.

Everhood could have been something great, but due to bad decisions on every aspect of game design, it fails to pass even the lowest standards for quality. If you have made it to the end of this review/rant, then my final score is my previously used Billy Madison quote, “I award you no points, and may god have mercy on your soul.”