EVERHOOD: HOW NOT TO CONSTRUCT A METAPHOR
I have issues with Everhood, which is tricky, because I know it's an important game for a lot of people and I have no interest in ruining that for them. I know it's an extremely well-reviewed game, and I can see why a lot of people like it. It came highly recommended to me from the same person who recommended one of my actual favorite games ever, Sayonara Wild Hearts. I have to imagine that person saw some common quality between both games, and I do think both games are ultimately about the complicated feelings around escaping bad situations and relationships -- the fear of trying, the pain of doing so, and ultimately, relief.
For that reason, while I have serious issues with the game, I think I can see why people like it. I can't really excuse the weird inconsistencies in the plot (not without an emotional throughline to follow, which I couldn't find) and quite possibly the worst message I have ever been exposed to in a video game. I don't think the developers are bad people, just careless and, in places, thoughtless. It says something that despite my misgivings, I am still going to play the sequel, if only to see if they will learn from their mistakes, or somehow find a way to make something even worse. If that's even possible.
By the way, like all my essays, every image has hover-over/long-press text, so make sure you don't miss those! Think of them like secret little footnotes, just for you!
If Everhood were just a bad game, I wouldn't feel compelled to write an essay about it. There's potential there!! I'm mad because there's potential there. But there's a pervasive carelessness, which culminates in a one-two punch of thoughtlessness that I have to fight not to perceive as malice. Two elements of the conclusion are so careless, so ill-conceived, that together they spoil any positive feelings I might have had about the game's message and themes.
To everyone who got something positive from Everhood, I'd bet anything that what you got from it is along the lines of what the developers intended you to get from it. I believe the changes I would make to Everhood wouldn't take away from the positive things that anyone else got from it. Whether or not that's true, I hope I can convey that my desire to put Everhood through the wringer comes not from a place of wanting to destroy it, but from seeing potential in it that I want to see realized in the sequel.
Let's start with some Good stuff, because there's definitely Good stuff.
PART 1: THE GOOD STUFF
The soundtrack is excellent. Solid A. It manages to pack in quite a bit of variety, while still feeling like it has an identity. You never know what to expect, and there are zero misses on the OST. Not quite the best-of-the-best as music games go, but up there.
The combat is good. Not perfect by any standard, but good. There's a lot of personality in every battle, with some extremely memorable, stand-out battles emerging from a pack that rarely misses. It's not my favorite music-based combat system ever, simply because I found the design of the later charts trended towards frantic note spam that favored twitchy reflexes over anything else. Your view of upcoming notes is extremely limited, giving you no time to plot a route through labyrinthine sequences, and the relatively low viewing angle makes it difficult to discern where the gaps between notes are.
Early songs create a strong connection between the notes of the music and the movements of the enemy character, while also providing a stepchart that feels like it has personality. I enjoyed these enough that I went back and got the No-Hit achievement for maybe half the songs in the story. That says something about the quality.
Later songs stray from this: there are often simply too many notes on the field to make anything coherent out of them, forcing you to juke through them purely on reflex. And while still obviously made with the song in mind, it strays from the tight feeling the early songs have.
I find myself comparing it to Sayonara Wild Hearts, which keeps its obstacles sparse and gives you a long enough field of view that it doesn't need a "dodge" mechanic at all. There are twitchy parts, but it doesn't hammer on that note nearly as hard as Everhood tends to.
Alternatively, there's Just Shapes and Beats, which has a generous "dodge" mechanic, but which gives you a full view of the field and telegraphs (almost) every single attack , making the game mostly a test of hustling to safe areas and weaving through clearly-defined bullets. Just Shapes and Beats never has you twitching through an incoherent mess, while Everhood leans on that for its challenge unfortunately often.
Everhood also flirts with the idea of being a UI-screw game, very occasionally bringing in a gimmick like warping, rotating or mirroring the screen. My favorite of these is a sequence where the game doesn't refresh any areas that would otherwise be black, creating that "hall of mirrors" effect you get when you clip out of bounds in Doom 1, or when you complete a game of Microsoft Solitaire.
I love that kind of thing, but I know other people hate it. And Everhood unfortunately ends up sitting on the fence, playing around with that kind of effect sparingly: not enough to fully satisfy me, but probably too much for anyone who isn't into it.
I downloaded a few random custom levels, and was immediately greeted with levels that did more with UI tomfoolery than the base game ever dared to. Alas.
All that said, the combat still works, and I enjoyed the mechanics enough to go back and try for Perfect Clears on every song from the first half of the game. I'm hoping that for the sequel, they lean more heavily on UI fuckery instead of raw reflex.
(It's also possible I'm getting older and my reflexes aren't what they used to be. I played on the highest difficulties for most of the game but ended up having to turn it down as I approached the climax of the main storyline, and gave up on completing the hardest fights in the game altogether.)
There is some genuinely funny comedy in the game. The RPG section, the plank renting service, getting captured by Professor Orange, Orange's attempt to resurrect an ancient creature, Orange's "quantum battle"... I guess I really liked Professor Orange's general deal.
Like I said, I went back for some of those No-Hit achievements.
The script is at least mildly amusing throughout... except when it comes to Harrowed Haley.
I hate how they handled Harrowed Haley.
I'm not ready to talk about Harrowed Haley. I'll get back to them.
I'll add that the script is generally alright throughout, but that it suffers from what I imagine is a translation issue. The script is flutent, but not quite native, making some of the dialogue oddly stilted. It's not a dealbreaker, but it's definitely noticeable.
Aside from that, there's plenty of dialogue that feels too on-the-nose, places where the dialogue would flow better if the script trusted the audience more. I generally found myself happy to talk to each NPC, even with the script faltering here and there.
There are some excellent character designs across the board. Green Mage, Rasta Beast and Zigg stand out, having strong personalities and relatively strong voices. That said, only Green Mage felt to me like they completely escaped the issue with stiltedness that muddies the distinctiveness of the rest of the characters. Even characters without much in the way of personality (being limited to showing up in battle, or being one-note gimmick NPCs, for example) tend to have strong visual designs. I could watch the Dev Gnomes dance all day long.
And again, for me, the game almost delivered on what I believe it intended as its message. If I thought it was aiming for a bad message, I wouldn't have played through it once, much less twice. I figure they will either spend more time with the script, which could resolve the kind of issues I had with Everhood 1... or they'll double down on the things I liked least about Everhood 1, in which case I will at least be entertained when I'm not mad.
Okay, so I'm going to walk through the major plot beats of Everhood's story, for those who haven't played, and to make sure I remember them. There's a major spoiler partway through, which I'll warn you about when you're getting closer, in case you want to go experience this game for yourself.