This review contains spoilers
Didn't really enjoy myself with this game. It only took me about 5 hours to beat but it felt so much longer, like it was dragging me along and I was just waiting for it to end.
To me the biggest flaw with this game is that it's a rhythm game that isn't really a rhythm game. The gameplay involves dodging notes on a guitar hero fretboard, notes that are being played by the enemy, not you. Thus you get to watch the enemy play a rhythm game while you get to play the most boring bullet hell ever created. Most rhythm games have intentionally simple gameplay so that doing simple actions to a beat or the tune of a song becomes satisfying to play. Everhood misses the mark by stripping away the rhythmic aspect that makes rhythm games so good, and all I'm left with is the aforementioned intentionally simple gameplay. Needless to say, it gets pretty boring pretty quickly.
And it's not as if notes being dictated by the enemy means that its impossible to create a sense of rhythm on the player side of gameplay. The optional jump rope fight in this game was one of my favorites due to the fact that it's just about the only fight that I can remember that does this. Jumping over the notes while using the song playing to help time actions perfectly made for incredibly satisfying gameplay that I was struggling to find in any other sections of Everhood. There's a really sound idea behind the concept of this game, but the execution of it is just falls short.
Around halfway through the game there's a bit of a twist in the mechanics involving grabbing two notes of the same color and releasing them to attack the enemy, rather than playing purely defense. While this still has the same problems as before it did make the gameplay more tolerable due to the player now having a more active role in battles. Weaving between notes is made a lot more fun when there's actual incentive to put yourself in danger in hopes of grabbing notes to shoot back as it makes gameplay much less passive than it was before. However it does come with the downside of making the game much easier (as grabbing notes acts as an extra defensive maneuver), and getting your shot blocked by a wall note that you couldn't have known would spawn in your lane quickly gets annoying.
Without compelling gameplay, I would hope that the psychedelic visuals could at least suck me into the world of Everhood, and while the game does succeed with this in certain fights and areas, these are few and far between. There are some genuinely magical moments in this game, but you're going to have to slog through too much bland gameplay for too few of these interesting moments. The ending section of this game is full of them, and I can't help but feel that these could've been better spread out throughout the game, especially considering how much the ending drags on and overstays its welcome. These particularly psychedelic moments also feel very much cheapened by the fact that the game is locked at a 4:3 aspect ratio, with the only real graphics settings in this game being the option to toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode with the F3 key. It's hard to get immersed in the visuals when I'm staring at big black bars at both sides of my screen.
That some of the moments in Everhood look spectacular doesn't diminish the fact that much of the game is spent in one of the shittiest looking overworlds I've ever seen in a game. Animations look janky, tiles are endlessly repeated, the fidelity in the sprites seems lower than it really should be. It's not something I'd really be concerned about if it weren't for the fact that the visuals are supposed to be one of this game's strengths, but since it is, I'm much more quick to criticize this. I can't pretend that graphics don't matter when the graphics are just about the only thing carrying this experience in lieu of bland gameplay.
As for the story, I don't have much to say about the it other than I found it unoriginal and uninteresting. This game is like your stereotypical stoner friend that won't shut up about how they discovered the meaning of life during an LSD trip they had. The game comes off as desperate to sound deep when nothing it said really connected with me due to how detached the game is from the player. Not a single one of the "absolute truths" the game placed so much emphasis on lasted more than five minutes in my brain due to how uninteresting I found them. Maybe there's someone out there that really connected to these, but I'm certainly not that person.
Overall the game wasn't THAT bad, I think I made it sound worse than it actually is. It isn't egregiously terrible or anything, if anything I'd describe it as lacking polish. You can at least tell the developers put their heart and soul into this project, but their efforts didn't quite pan out, leaving us with this game that feels like wasted potential. Hopefully the sequel addresses these issues, but honestly I was too uninvested in this game to care about checking that out whenever it releases.
To me the biggest flaw with this game is that it's a rhythm game that isn't really a rhythm game. The gameplay involves dodging notes on a guitar hero fretboard, notes that are being played by the enemy, not you. Thus you get to watch the enemy play a rhythm game while you get to play the most boring bullet hell ever created. Most rhythm games have intentionally simple gameplay so that doing simple actions to a beat or the tune of a song becomes satisfying to play. Everhood misses the mark by stripping away the rhythmic aspect that makes rhythm games so good, and all I'm left with is the aforementioned intentionally simple gameplay. Needless to say, it gets pretty boring pretty quickly.
And it's not as if notes being dictated by the enemy means that its impossible to create a sense of rhythm on the player side of gameplay. The optional jump rope fight in this game was one of my favorites due to the fact that it's just about the only fight that I can remember that does this. Jumping over the notes while using the song playing to help time actions perfectly made for incredibly satisfying gameplay that I was struggling to find in any other sections of Everhood. There's a really sound idea behind the concept of this game, but the execution of it is just falls short.
Around halfway through the game there's a bit of a twist in the mechanics involving grabbing two notes of the same color and releasing them to attack the enemy, rather than playing purely defense. While this still has the same problems as before it did make the gameplay more tolerable due to the player now having a more active role in battles. Weaving between notes is made a lot more fun when there's actual incentive to put yourself in danger in hopes of grabbing notes to shoot back as it makes gameplay much less passive than it was before. However it does come with the downside of making the game much easier (as grabbing notes acts as an extra defensive maneuver), and getting your shot blocked by a wall note that you couldn't have known would spawn in your lane quickly gets annoying.
Without compelling gameplay, I would hope that the psychedelic visuals could at least suck me into the world of Everhood, and while the game does succeed with this in certain fights and areas, these are few and far between. There are some genuinely magical moments in this game, but you're going to have to slog through too much bland gameplay for too few of these interesting moments. The ending section of this game is full of them, and I can't help but feel that these could've been better spread out throughout the game, especially considering how much the ending drags on and overstays its welcome. These particularly psychedelic moments also feel very much cheapened by the fact that the game is locked at a 4:3 aspect ratio, with the only real graphics settings in this game being the option to toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode with the F3 key. It's hard to get immersed in the visuals when I'm staring at big black bars at both sides of my screen.
That some of the moments in Everhood look spectacular doesn't diminish the fact that much of the game is spent in one of the shittiest looking overworlds I've ever seen in a game. Animations look janky, tiles are endlessly repeated, the fidelity in the sprites seems lower than it really should be. It's not something I'd really be concerned about if it weren't for the fact that the visuals are supposed to be one of this game's strengths, but since it is, I'm much more quick to criticize this. I can't pretend that graphics don't matter when the graphics are just about the only thing carrying this experience in lieu of bland gameplay.
As for the story, I don't have much to say about the it other than I found it unoriginal and uninteresting. This game is like your stereotypical stoner friend that won't shut up about how they discovered the meaning of life during an LSD trip they had. The game comes off as desperate to sound deep when nothing it said really connected with me due to how detached the game is from the player. Not a single one of the "absolute truths" the game placed so much emphasis on lasted more than five minutes in my brain due to how uninteresting I found them. Maybe there's someone out there that really connected to these, but I'm certainly not that person.
Overall the game wasn't THAT bad, I think I made it sound worse than it actually is. It isn't egregiously terrible or anything, if anything I'd describe it as lacking polish. You can at least tell the developers put their heart and soul into this project, but their efforts didn't quite pan out, leaving us with this game that feels like wasted potential. Hopefully the sequel addresses these issues, but honestly I was too uninvested in this game to care about checking that out whenever it releases.