PART 2: THE PLOT RECAP: ACT 1
Everhood opens with a Deltarune sequence, in which you're asked to "abandon Humanity, Time, and accept Immortality."
You can say no, in which case you'll be shunted back to the title screen. And then when you start a new game, it will remember that you said no last time! Hey, that's like Undertale!
As far as I'm aware, this is the only time the game will remember your actions like this. It feels like the devs wanted to do like Undertale and have some of the characters be aware of your actions from previous saves/runs, but then gave up as soon as they got past the initial, trivial case. There's stuff in the game that evokes a sense of "you've done this before," but it's not actually dependent on you having done anything before. It seems to imply that you, as a player, have done things in the world of Everhood in the past, but this didn't land for me since I didn't actually do them.
There's one bit where this works -- if you succeed at a tremendously difficult sequence that you are expected to fail at, you get a glimpse of the consequences of every previous attempt. It would play out the same way even if you won on your first try, but that's nigh-impossible, so it works. That said, nothing else in the game seems to imply that consequences can accumulate over multiple attempts. So. It still works, but it would've been even better if it had been integrated into anything else.
After that, we get a shot of a disassembled doll in a forest. Think of them like a cross between Super Mario RPG's Geno, and the color red. They're Red Geno.
A gnome dressed in blue, Blue Thief (looking and acting like one of those potion gnomes from Golden Axe), runs in and steals one of the doll's arms.
The doll, named Red, reassembles itself and goes after them. The first half of the game is dedicated to you, as Red, attempting to recover your arm.
You meet a frog along the path who gives you a tutorial. If this description seems bland and non-descriptive so far, it's because there's really nothing else to say at this point. There's nothing to say about the characterization or the setting yet.
Combat is simple enough: there are five lanes that notes travel down, and you have to dodge them by shifting between lanes, jumping, and jump-rolling until your opponent exhausts themselves. Taking a hit costs you HP, which regenerates if you can avoid taking damage for long enough. It's a pretty decent approach to HP, making it so the occasional mistake doesn't hang over your head for the rest of the song. That said, it can be frustrating to be seconds away from the end of a song, make a few mistakes in a row and get sent back to the beginning. The lack of long-term consequences for making a mistake made it harder for me to engage with the combat.
Everhood offers six difficulties, with harder difficulties not changing the stepcharts, but instead only increasing the HP lost per hit and the time it takes to recover it. That's it. That's the combat. It works, for the reasons I mentioned previously.
The very next character you meet is an ATM with Flowey from Undertale's face. Which is stupid! I don't like it!
Everhood already looks and feels like a reactionary Undertale! It's an impression that's drilled into you before you even manage to leave the Steam store page, and firmly cemented by the time you hit the Deltarune-inspired opening. Why did this need to be here? This ATM doesn't have anything to do with Flowey besides having Flowey's face. It's a reference that doesn't do anything besides awkwardly say, "Hey, remember Undertale? Undertale? Flowey Undertale? Remember Flowey? From Undertale?"
It doesn't help that the battle itself is dull, with a boring stepchart and a forgettable song. This is the first battle of the game! This was its opportunity to establish its identity!! Instead, it squandered that opportunity twice over, with a tepid reference and a tedious battle that had me tabbing away to confirm Steam's refund policy.
I wouldn't be surprised if this was the first real battle the devs put together, before they knew what they were doing, and never went back to revise it. In terms of battles, it is the unambiguous lowest point of the game, and it arrives right when the game should be trying to hook you.
...I almost made a snide remark about how it must have taken the devs a lot of restraint to avoid making a "The Cake is a Lie" reference as well, but then I remembered:
(thanks to Fliss for pointing out the similarity to the Portal icon!)
Thankfully, it does get better from there! After that, you enter a dance club, meet a few of the kooky recurring characters, and then inevitably bump into a cool vampire-looking character named Zigg, spilling their drink. Zigg gets pissed at you for spilling their expensive drink (the last time money comes up in the game) and challenges you to a dance battle to the death.
Zigg is awesome. They rescue the game after the horrible stumble in momentum that is the Flowey ATM fight. Your cool dance moves are so impressive that it makes Zigg's shades explode, prompting them to start sweeping long streams of eye lasers across the field, before putting on a backup pair of shades.
It's great. You can feel the personality in their stepchart, forced to slalom between individual beats before having to weave past their eye lasers whenever you get an opening. Zigg is positioned perfectly, hitting all the right notes of a "first boss" character.
You exhaust Zigg to the point of collapse, allowing you to nab their VIP card, which lets you pursue Blue Thief into the backroom of the club. There, you find a treasure horde gathered by the monstrous Gold Pig, who was the one who commanded Blue Thief to steal your arm in the first place.
Gold Pig telekinetically seizes you without a fight and drops you into an incinerator. The incinerator turns into an "overworld" battle, but it's one you're intended to lose, burning you to death.
Burning to death drops you into a battle in the afterlife. Completing that battle has you walk a short path (through an area that doesn't look different from any part of the game), followed by a second battle. Both battles are trippy battles in the afterlife. They're nonsense, but also good fun.
The UI screwery is heaviest here, and I wish there had been more of it in the rest of the game. It's weird and abstract and great. You fight a white Aztec(?) skeleton with a dinosaur skull for a hand, who explodes into Terra from FF6 a non-infringing glowing pink spirit, who remains curled up in a fetal position until they absorb an endless trail of stick figures, who then makes it rain as they drift away, their light hinting at something massive and invisible in the distance.
There's a weird grinning face (possibly the Buddha), an army of gnomes, and then the Buddha (definitely the Buddha).
By this point, your screen is rotating and the background is doing the screen-bleed/Hall-of-Mirrors thing and your controls are getting reversed and the camera is drunkenly listing from side-to-side and it's great. Love it. Great stuff.
You're eventually resurrected by the weird omniscient narrator from the intro, who tells you that your death shouldn't have been possible, so they're going to restore your body to before you got incinerated. Remember that for later.
You wake up in the ruined incinerator, with Gold Pig gone. Blue Thief is still there, though, because they had their legs stolen by Gold Pig. They're not a doll, their legs are just detachable. For some reason. The two of you form an alliance, you being the legs and Blue Thief being the voice, as you work together to recover your pilfered limbs from Gold Pig.
You arrive at a hub world, which consists of a bunch of free-standing doors that lead to various little realms. There's also a conspicuous empty frame that goes nowhere, which you learn will lead you to Gold Pig's hideout once you've reassembled its door.
You spend some time exploring the various worlds, meeting the same zany, kooky characters in each locale and collecting pieces of the missing door. There's an Outrun-inspired go-kart minigame, a dreadfully tedious obstacle course, a creepy Cursed Castle that is conscious and speaks to you, a mad scientist's lab, an extended trading sequence à la Link's Awakening (except with most of the trading being done in a single area, all in a row), etc. There's enough variety to keep things fresh, each little realm having a different tone and flow than the others.
The highlight is getting invited to join a tabletop roleplaying game called Medallion (clearly based on Talisman) with some of your new buds.
Just as an aside, Everhood has Rasta Beast in it, and they own. It's clear from when you first meet them that they own. They're just cool. They have a cool design, they're fun and they seem like they're really with it. They seem genuinely friendly, in a way that stands out in a setting where most of the characters are Extremely Weird and Definitely Not All There. You get to bond with them over the course of the Medallion game and it's great. Love it. Rasta Beast and Green Mage are the best characters in a game, hands-down.
Everhood has that "indie horror game" vibe to it, where everything is light-hearted on a surface level while also making it extremely obvious that you're supposed to feel unsettled by how things Aren't Quite Right. There's a movie theater that plays only static, yet still has attendees staring at the endless noise. While walking through the hub world, it's possible for lightning to strike, revealing an endless background of tally marks. Sometimes you see a rabbit that runs off as you approach it. In the dance club, you can find a floating mask that gives you a magic 8-ball which reveals how many souls are in the realm right now. There's a mage that lives as a recluse in their tower, paranoid about any possible danger and only interacting with the outside world through a speaking tube.
As the only other character who comes close to being as cool as Rasta Beast, Green Mage goes from needing your help finding their single eye in a swamp, to helping you remove a boulder in your path to return the favor, to attacking you because you're in a weakened, one-arm state, to inviting you to participate in their tabletop RPG. Professor Orange catches you in a pretty funny trap that legitimately caught me off-guard the first time I played, followed by a few funny attempts to defeat you with their scientific genius.
It's that Undertale vibe, where characters are technically "threatening" you, but in a lighthearted framework.
As a result, every character has a sense of playfulness and levity to them.
With an exception.
There's a character in Professor Orange's lab, Harrowed Haley, who looks completely withered and seems mentally broken to the point of not even knowing where they are, trapped in a miserable existence of delusion and agony.
This ruined the tone for me: instead of Professor Orange being a goofy, comedic mad scientist with zany inventions for you to challenge, they're now responsible for mentally breaking someone and keeping them in perpetual agony as a result of their experiments. That's not fun. That's horrible.
I have more to say about Harrowed Haley. I'm still not ready to really talk about them. We'll come back to them, I promise.
Continuing along, you encounter a Mirror of Truth; looking into it causes Red's reflection to say that it divided itself into pieces to protect everyone, that they disgust it, and that it has nothing more to say to them. So. There's clearly there's Something going on.
Also, every so often, a character will refer... the HUMAN. Gasp! That's right, they're talking to you! The player! It's like in Undertale and Deltarune, where "The Player" is treated like a character in the game!
It didn't really do anything for me. It just felt like each time was supposed to be A DRAMATIC REVEAL, but with no real payoff. It's implied that I, as the player, have controlled Red in the past. Except... I haven't. "Your character has amnesia" works in a way that "you, the person playing this, has amnesia" doesn't. I guess I kinda see how it could be a cool implication, but it doesn't feel like the game does anything with it besides use it as a Plot Twist.
It's built up over the course of the game, but I don't get what the point was supposed to be, in the end. I hate to constantly bring up Undertale, but it seems like they were trying to make me reflect on my behavior à la Undertale's genocide route. Except instead of luring me into performing horrible deeds of my own volition and then calling me out for it, they just imply that I did them at some previous time? So it never actually connected with me, and then gets further muddied later.
(Also later the game goes back on this, implying that it's been a series of humans controlling Red, even though this sequence puts the blame on you for Red's past actions. This game is so inconsistent.)
This is endemic throughout Everhood: things that seem important never end up with any real payoff, and things that seem unimportant are brought back for massive climaxes with no actual buildup. In fact, I've already mentioned a super critical character who holds the key to Red's identity, as well as the character who acts as the final battle of Act 2, kicking off the game's finale. See if you can guess either of these. The character who holds the key to Red's identity will only show up once more before The Big Twist, so keep your eyes peeled.
Eventually you reassemble the missing door and pass through a desert to reach Gold Pig's castle.
In the castle, you're confronted by Purple Mage and their undead minions as you work your way to Gold Pig's throne room. The minions are a lot of fun, and Purple Mage has a fun combat mechanic that I think could have been emphasized more: when you take damage, the song also loops back to an earlier point in the song, forcing you to replay the part that just tripped you up. Neat idea, but I didn't even notice it on my first playthrough. Having a more obvious "rewind" effect would've gone a long way.
Points for cleverness, though: having a wizard figure out what part of the song you keep fucking up and forcing you to replay it repeatedly as a way of "finding your weakness" is a clever idea.
You also learn through a loredump note that some of the residents of Everhood used to be human, and came through a rift to this place, achieving immortality in doing so. The note implies that there used to be millions of residents here, as opposed to the 28... no, 30 souls remaining by this point in the game. (Purple Mage summoning two undead minions causes your 8-ball's soul counter to go up by 2, which is a neat little touch.) You also learn that Everhood is a place where memories are transient, allowing you to live out the same euphoric moment again and again, always forgetting it happened so you can experience it fresh again. Fucked up. But also convenient for a script where the characters don't seem to have any consistent motivations or knowledge!
You best Purple Mage and confront Gold Pig. This time, there's no incinerator, so you enter a battle with them. It's solid as the climactic fight which closes out Act 1. Gold Pig has several distinct patterns to their attacks (stomping their feet, channeling power through their hands, tapping into the power of the gems of their necklace), which I enjoy every time Everhood does it. There's a bridge in the middle where Gold Pig recedes into a fog, leaving only their eye visible. Good visuals, making for an appropriately intense fight.
At one point, that pink spirit from before shows up and asks why you keep coming back, lamenting that they're powerless to stop you. I thought the gems on Gold Pig's necklace or their stepchart might be more tied into Gold Pig's control over Green and Purple Mage, but unfortunately it seems like there's no connection there. A shame.
Once you defeat them, Purple Mage shows up to ask Gold Pig why they keep challenging you when they always lose. Apparently Red has an "Other Side," one that Gold Pig has battled before. Green Mage and Purple Mage chide Gold Pig about stealing Blue Thief's legs out of pointless greed, and for stalling on giving Red their arm back when it's clear they've won.
So it's clear Something is going on, but Green Mage and Purple Mage both seem positive about you getting your arm back, with Green Mage saying they understand what it's like to have lost something "essential," and Purple Mage saying you've fought hard and earned your reward.
You walk down a hallway, go to get your arm, and as you reach for it, lightning flashes, revealing a wall of panicked scrawled messages like "STOP" and "LEAVE" and "SCRAM" and "DEMON" and "NO MORE."
You reattach your arm. Credits roll.
...
and then, of course, the game continues. Act 1 over. Act 2 begins.
Here's where the midgame major spoiler happens. If you're interested in playing Everhood for yourself, this would be a good chance to bail and come back.
...
...
If you're still reading, it's time to talk about the twist, and how everything falls apart from here.