PART 4: THE PLOT RECAP: ACT 2: PART 2
One soul left. One soul left to kill. What a moment it is.
Who's even left, after you've killed everyone else?
That's right. It's you.
It's time to die.
Except it's not you. Wrong, idiot! It's the sun.
"What?" you are probably saying right now. I know it's what I said.
The sun doesn't appear or even get mentioned in the game prior to this. Or, well, it does, but I managed to miss it.
Do you remember the rabbit I mentioned 5000 words ago? The one you can find in a few places, but can't interact with because it runs off immediately?
Well, it turns out in each room where you can spot it, you can backtrack after seeing it, and from a certain spot in that room, spot a white point of light in the otherwise black sky.
That's it. That's the build-up. You sometimes see a rabbit and sometimes seeing the rabbit makes a white dot appear somewhere in that map area.
I really need to harp on this. You spend all of Act 2 with this soul countdown looming over you, building up towards a final, climatic battle, and it turns out it's... fighting... the Sun? Which was represented by... a rabbit? For some reason? The Sun is a rabbit?
This is what I mean by tremendous climaxes with absolutely no build-up. Why a rabbit? Why the Sun? If this is what the writers wanted, why not work in metaphors about light or sunlight or dawns or dusks or sunsets or characters looking to the sky and seeing the Sun or warmth or missing the Sun or "hope running away from you" and hope being represented by the Sun which doesn't show up in the sky anymore or anything anything anything about the Sun??
It gave me nothing so much as an impression that they wrote the script in one pass, improving in whatever felt "cool" in the moment, without going back and actually developing any of their ideas.
I imagine it sounds unfair of me to keep insisting that the game feels like the script was improvised instead of planned out. Here's the thing: it feels that way because it's true. The devs admitted as much, in this IGN interview.
The story, he says, was largely improvised as he and Roca went along, for instance. "We just tried to create interesting scenes with the hope that we’d find the overarching story along the way."
Aughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Listen, "going where the story takes you" is fantastic for a first pass. Definitely better to give your ideas a chance to develop naturally without you trying to impose a Message right from the very beginning. I'm all for favoring exploration over trying to be Clever and Deep right off the bat.
But it kills me to think about how much time, effort and love must have gone into Everhood, only for the writers to just not bother in some regards. There are so many places where it feels like they hit what could've been an incredible emotional beat, but just did not put in the groundwork to really make that beat the best it could be.
This is why I've been saying that a second or third pass would've done so much for the game and its muddled throughlines. I think what people love about it are these incredible moments, and all I can think about is how much better they could've been if they'd actually been established.
So instead of what feels like a cohesive, thematically rich story you get... "interesting scenes." Okay time to fight THE SUN, I guess.
The Sun battle is exceedingly cool and supremely intense. The camera zooms back, notes rocket towards you from the ever-growing expanse of the sun's surface, there's a temperature meter that rises cataclysmically; it's fantastic and fun. I just wish it hadn't come out of absolutely nowhere.
You kill the sun and, hooray, everyone is freed from their tormented existence!! Hooray!!
But also the Mages are mad at you!! Since you killed them!! Oops!!
Yes, despite the game endlessly, incessantly insisting that what you did for the Mages was an unambiguous good, the Mages still get a chance to beat you up because they "feel wronged" by you having killed them. I don't know whose side I'm on at this point, honestly.
And since the Mages are able to sustain their forms beyond death due to their Mage Powers, you now have to fight them! ALL OF THEM! AT ONCE!
It's chaotic and amazing, and super appropriate as a climatic final-final battle. Here, the "meaningless" nature of the fight works. There is no "point" to the battle, and there doesn't need to be: this is simply you facing down the wrath you've incurred. You, in a group battle against the mages, facing impossible odds.
AND THEN RASTA BEAST SHOWS UP OUT OF NOWHERE TO FIGHT YOU INSTEAD
RASTA BEAST SHOVES ALL THE DICKHEAD MAGES ASIDE SO THEY CAN 1-V-1 YOU IN THE SPACE BETWEEN LIFE AND DEATH
This is given no explanation. The ONLY reason the Mages are able to keep fighting after their deaths is because of their Mage Powers and Soulbound Gems and whatnot, which Rasta Beast does not have. They're just some guy. And it's fucking badass. Through sheer force of Fuck You, Rasta Beast returns from beyond the end of existence just to punch your stupid murderous face in, you dumb asshole.
It is hands-down the coolest fucking moment in all of Everhood, oh my god, just absolutely brilliant. When I said this game had Good things about it, I was not just being polite. Rasta Beast, best character. What a perfect capstone for the final-final battle.
Your battle rages against Rasta Beast until --
Do you remember that pink spirit? The one I mentioned 7000 words ago, who showed up in the afterlife section amidst a bunch of abstract imagery? And who showed up to say two sentences during the Gold Pig battle? Well, they're back! They show up to stop the fight, chiding everyone who's attacking you, reminding them all that you were only ever helping them.
At this point, you might be saying, "What?" again.
I almost cheated and didn't mention them showing up during the Gold Pig battle, because I forgot all about it. I was only reminded of them showing up like that when I played Everhood a second time, specifically to write this essay. It's a potentially significant moment, but it doesn't connect to anything else at the time, so it's easy to forget.
This is a game with weird Aztec Dinosaurs representing the afterlife?/psychopomps?, hallucinogenic mushrooms, the Buddha showing up to cause screenbleed, the developers appearing as gnomes in their own game, and so on. One pink spirit floating around for 10 seconds is not going to leave a strong impression in a game that runs entirely on Vibes.
Regardless, having said a grand total of two lines in the story so far, now they're back, and stopping the fight. (Also, Red collapses into puppet parts as soon as Pink shows up.)
So, right. In the middle of the battle, Pink shows up and browbeats Rasta Beast and the Mages for taking their anger at being murdered out on you, when what you were doing was objectively helping them. The Mages, ashamed, stop fighting. The battle ends, and the game transitions back to walkabout sprites.
Pink turns around and asks you how you were capable of doing such a cruel thing as killing them all, and how monstrous you are for doing so.
What?
Even writing that, I'm saying, "What?"
I genuinely don't know what to make of this. Pink goes from shouting your innocence at the Mages to admonishing you for being monstrous, with only a screen transition separating the two.
I can take a guess? Maybe they wanted Pink to refer to how difficult it must have felt like to kill everyone? Like... okay, I can imagine saying to a surgeon, "I don't know how you can handle slicing into someone else's flesh, even knowing you're saving their life. It sounds so horrible to have to do." But that's not how the dialogue comes across. You wouldn't call a surgeon "monstrous" for doing what they do.
I have a second theory, but it's less generous, so I'll save it for later.
So Pink seems horrified with the actions they were just praising, which is when the other Mages drop the big reveal, the huge twist, the mindbending secret the game has been hiding from you all this time, the massive payoff that recontextualizes everything you've been through:
Red. and. Pink. Are. The Same. Character.
What.
You... can't do a big shocking "these two characters are the same!!" moment when one character is a voiceless, blank-slate player vehicle, and the other wasn't so much a character as a fancy visual flourish. Pink spends nearly all of Act 1 no more relevant than the wacky Aztec Dinosaur-Hand Skeleton they show up alongside, and then isn't present for Act 2.
I hope you see what I mean by now, when I say things that got no build-up receive unearned "massive climax" scenes. A twist with no build-up is nothing! Nothing's changed for me! I don't know who Pink is!
With that in mind, I think the "Pink = Red" reveal might shed some light on why Pink goes from defending you in the battle to demonizing you in the immediate aftermath. I think what happened was that the writers needed Pink to stop the fight, which meant Pink needed to remind the Mages that you were trying to help them. But they also needed Pink to talk about how different they are from Red to prompt the "but you're the same character!" reveal. That means Pink needs to distance themself from your actions, and the easiest way to do that is by condemning them.
So: Pink concludes one plot beat by defending you, then starts the next one by condemning you. This makes Pink inconsistent from one sentence to the next, but the devs don't seem to care about that. They'll write whatever they need to make the current scene flow, because that's all that matters to them.
I hope that's not the case, because it's not great. But I don't have a better explanation. This contradictory juxtaposition gave me whiplash. I don't understand how it made it into the final game. I don't understand how the devs didn't care to find a better bridge between these two beats.
So the explanation for the Pink/Red thing is that Pink loved being nice and Not Killing Everyone, but sometimes Pink would go Crazy, and end up going on horrible rampages where they would try to Kill Everyone. So to help Pink with their Killing Everyone problem, Professor Orange built Pink a doll body, the latest iteration of that doll body being Red. The doll bodies could be disassembled to prevent them from Killing Everyone, solving the problem once and for all.
Except the dolls would end up Killing Everyone anyway, over and over, causing the population to dwindle over the tens of thousands of cycles it must have taken. This process persisted over countless eons, reducing a population of millions down to 30, which is where the game starts.
Oh, except also, you haven't been playing as Red at all: "Red" got destroyed in the Incinerator, waaaaaaaaay back at the beginning of the game. Pink, distraught over the idea of being able to kill again, deluded themself into THINKING they still had the "Red" body. And also, somehow, this made everyone else see them as Red, I guess?? I don't know how this is supposed to work at all??
Okay. I have so many questions.
To begin with, why build a doll with two arms to begin with? If the whole point of the doll body is to limit Pink's ability to Kill Everyone, why did Professor Orange build a doll that can Kill Everyone? They mentioned looking for "a solution" for the Killing Everyone thing back when you battled them in Act 1, but wouldn't an obvious solution be to build a doll that can't Kill Everyone?
I get that Pink is possessing the doll, and not having a full range of motion or all your limbs would really suck. But it seems like Killing Everyone is traumatic for them, and after the first two or three or fifty thousand times they went into a Killing Everyone rampage, it might be time to build them a body that can be made permanently safe.
One of the Super Secret Endings you can get during a New Game+ sheds some light on this. In that ending, you accidentally walk into a second incinerator, which destroys your doll body (or I guess forces you to realize your doll body was already destroyed), leaving Pink behind. It's implied that this is how all your previous genocides ended, with Professor Orange building you a new doll body each time, hoping it would "fix" you.
This almost makes sense, except it doesn't. How does the Super Secret Ending work, when your doll body was already destroyed? Wouldn't the residents start to be wary of new dolls showing up to their stagnant existence, if every new doll eventually goes genocidal? Why did Professor Orange build a doll with two arms every single time?
Moving on, why does Frog treat you like the key to ending the realm, as if you were the only one capable of killing? Purple Mage and Gold Pig both threaten to kill you. The incinerator is proven to be deadly to anyone who's not Pink. What makes Pink's ability to kill so special?
Was the Mysterious Narrator Voice just lying when they said they would restore your body to before you got incinerated? If so, why? Just so the game's narrative could function?
Why is Gold Pig the only one willing to even try to neutralize the doll's Killing Everyone ability, when being able to neutralize the doll's Killing Everyone ability is the only reason the doll body exists in the first place?
Why doesn't everyone you meet try to stop you from getting your arm back, since that will begin the next wave of you Killing Everyone? Yes, I know everyone in the realm is weirdly forgetful, but that feels to me like a post-hoc excuse so that Act 1 could happen.
Even if you don't consider these unanswered questions to be plot holes since there's technically an explanation in "everyone just forgot the specific convenient facts necessary for the plot to work!", it undercuts any sense of consistency in the characters. "Every single character has plot-convenient amnesia" means you can never trust how any character reacts to any situation, since you don't know what they're forgetting at the moment for the purposes of making that scene work. You can never gauge how someone actually feels about something if they're being written to make the scene work to the exclusion of everything else.
What's the deal with Pink finding Red's arm at the end of Act 1? The rest of the Red body is gone, so what do they do with it? Maybe they just... try to attach it, let it fall to the ground, and ignore it? Maybe they destroy the arm in the process of deluding themselves into thinking they've reattached it?
Also, it's kind of weird to me that Pink's will is still strong enough to maintain the "one-armed Red" illusion even after Red got incinerated, but then they give up on trying to delude themself about being in a Ready to Kill state once they found Red's arm again. I would've expected at least some resistance there.
I'm not trying to CinemaSins this game. Things in games can make emotional sense without making rational sense. I just don't see how the solution to Pink Killing Everyone was to give them a doll body that can Kill Everyone on either a practical or metaphorical level. If there's symbolism here, I don't get it.
I feel like it all makes some sense to me, but not enough. There's definitely some kind of central idea of Pink being wrapped in several layers of self-denial: hoping that a doll body would fix their problem, deluding themself into thinking they were in a doll body when they weren't, handing over control to The Doll / You for the entire game... but I don't know what to make of it, in the end. It feels like some vaguely cool ideas with no actual thesis behind them.
There's no consistency to the characters. None of the characters seem to really care one way or another whether Red gets their arm back during Act 1, which only makes sense if they don't recognize Red/Pink: either they'd have a death wish and want to help (and it seems like Green Mage might subconsciously be acting this way: in a rare moment of hesitation, they pause before giving you a door piece you need to confront Gold Pig, as if recognizing the peril they're enabling by handing it over), or they'd be afraid of death and do everything in their power to help Gold Pig. And then when you do get your arm back, some of the characters go from not really caring to fearing/hating you the moment you've recovered it.
Why is Rasta Beast so friendly to you throughout all of Act 1, only to immediately recognize you as a repeat serial murderer once you recover your arm? Even if the idea is that they're trying to make friends to discourage you from going Murder Mode again, why don't they do anything to discourage you from getting your arm back?
Rasta Beast is more passionate about life than any other character in the game. Immediately after you re-acquire your arm, they lock the entrance to the game's only town and appoint themselves the protector of everyone inside. So they knew what was coming, but also didn't make even the slightest effort to stop you before you re-acquire it. Why? What's the point of being cryptic?
The point, obviously, is to preserve the mystery for the player, without any consideration for the character. And that fits with how other characters are written: as if they always know exactly what the player knows and nothing more. Gold Pig isn't scared of Red getting their arm back until you, the player, learn that it makes you dangerous. Rasta Beast telling you that "[your] path will only lead to more torment" makes sense for a character interpreting tea leaves, not a character watching a Knife Murderer walk into a Knife Store holding their semi-annual Knife Sale on Murder Knives.
And to be sure, a plot doesn't have to make perfect rational sense to still make emotional sense. I adore Sayonara Wild Hearts, and that game's plot is told entirely through the medium of rad stunts, ephemeral motorcycles and face punches.
But having played through Everhood twice, I still cannot tell you what is going through Rasta Beast's mind when they give you their little campfire speech. Vaguely, I understand they're trying to deter you from pursuing your arm since that will result in more death, and more suffering for Pink. But what are the thoughts and feelings that lead them to express their fears as a few cryptic statements before letting you continue on your way?
I think the devs could've built a clear metaphor on top of the foundation that they seemed to be working towards. For example: why give the Red body two arms? They could've included something about how you can't really live without accepting every part of yourself. They could've included something about how being afraid of your "dangerous" aspects and trying to repress them just makes you dangerous. Something like that. Anything like that.
Instead it just feels like a bunch of hasty justifications thrown in after the fact to try to explain the Pink=Red twist. It does not feel like anything prior to this was written with Pink=Red in mind. It's a cool twist, and then some hasty rationalizations thrown in to pretend it was planned from the start. Stuff just happens, and it just keeps happening, and characters say whatever the current scene demands, and nothing more.
I cannot find the emotional throughline that carries me through "you thought you were playing as a doll, but actually you were playing a character who thought they were possessing a doll but actually weren't, and no one recognizes you because you're in the doll body but actually you were never in the doll body. And you, the player are responsible for the past genocides, except actually it was other humans, and those were terrible but now we need to you to finish those terrible genocides, except plenty of characters can kill, and also anyone who's dead can pass onto the next realm whenever the narrator feels like it." I don't know how to make sense of it.
Also, hey, why does Frog care so much that you refuse to Kill Everyone? If this cycle of trying to Kill Everyone has happened countless times before over countless eons, why is it so upsetting that this particular cycle seems to be a bust? I know they'd have to wait for another human, but why is this their breaking point, when they've apparently had to wait through thousands or millions of these cycles before? They've had enough murder-happy humans in the past to reduce their population from millions to just 30, so why is one conscientious objector such a big deal?
And hey doesn't this "Pink has been repeatedly traumatized by the Evil Murders they were forced to do" thing completely fuck over the entire emotional throughline of Act 2? How are you supposed to feel justified in forcing Pink to kill the last of their friends with their own hands? Doesn't that completely fuck over the "murder is merciful and just" symbolism that the entire game hinged its premise upon?
What is Killing Everyone supposed to mean to me, Everhood? Because up until this moment, I thought the game wanted me to understand "Killing" as a noble, courageous act of ending cycles. "Killing" only in a metaphorical sense. "The Death tarot card isn't literal death, it's change." Sure, fine.
But now it turns out sometimes Killing Everyone is just literal murder, something that people with mental issues sometimes do because they're just randomly compelled to? Everhood asks you to differentiate between killing, which is something good people do to break stagnation and allow for rebirth... and killing, which is something that mentally ill people just randomly do because they're prone to being possessed by Evil.
What the fuck, Everhood?
I don't love those implications about mental illness!! Or killing!!
And, I'm just going to say it: Pink handing control back to the Player after the Player (or a Player, or Players) has been the one responsible for manipulating Pink, traumatizing them and murdering their friends feels like an abuse victim handing control back to their abuser. I don't know what conclusion the devs wanted me to draw from the "control me" scene, but it feels like accepting that your abuser knows best.
And as bad as that is, it's not even the worst message Everhood has to offer. I'm still not ready to talk about Harrowed Haley.
After the big twist, the other Mages, Rasta Beast and Red's parts fade away. You go through a sequence where you can't control Pink, but Pink also doesn't want to be in control. Red's bandana rematerializes, and Pink tries wearing it to give control back to... Red. Or, the Player. Pink seems to refer to the two interchangeably. Their effort to relinquish control doesn't succeed until they put the bandana on like a blindfold.
I'm not sure I get this part. Red, as I understand it, is Pink's attempt to defy outside control. Red allows them to disable themselves whenever they're losing control, giving them back some degree of autonomy. In this sequence, a series of on-screen button prompts fails to control Pink, until they accept Red's bandanna again, which would imply Red represents the Player's influence.
But Red was a means of impeding The Player, not granting them control. Red was the self-delusion Pink created for themself to convince themself they couldn't kill while under the Player's influence. It doesn't help that the implication is that all of Pink's previous Murder Sprees have been the result of random humans, one for each Spree. Red / You, The Player / Pink's Murder Urges all get conflated here, which doesn't hold together symbolically or emotionally.
Which... to draw the unfortunate comparison, feels like an Undertale/Deltarune thing. Undertale has a Player/Character separation twist which works, and ties into how you've been interacting with the world the entire time you've played. It is handled very intentionally, as part of the game's exploration with how you engage it. Likewise, Deltarune seems to be setting something similar up; given how it plays with the SOUL that inhabits Kris, what events the player is allowed to witness (whenever the player's view leaves Kris, it's always because Ralsei prompted Kris/the player to focus elsewhere), how the ending of Chapter 1 explicitly draws a distinction between Kris and the SOUL, etc.
Everhood, in contrast, is just so muddied. Murder is Awful Until It's Good. Pink = Red except also You = Red and also also Red Was Destroyed ten minutes into the game. Red = Self-Control and also Surrendering Control. To say the script needed another pass is an understatement.
You get one last meeting with Frog before wandering into a swamp. You can trudge through the infinite swamp for as long as you like, but the only thing to do now is to stand still and let yourself slowly sink into the mire. Great, more muddling of imagery! The problem with the realm was that it was stagnant, and the final solution to stagnation is... to stand still? The final step to not simply accepting what's happening is... to stand still and accept what happens? Great job, Everhood.
You're eventually given a prompt to let yourself sink all the way. I get this is supposed to be accepting that Things End, and being at peace with Death (in both the metaphorical and literal sense), but it felt like self-harm to me. I didn't love it.
Ultimately, you have to choose to let yourself die. There's a final-final-final battle against an abstract cube, titled The Universe.
And then, it's all over.
Blackness.
...
And then the realm is reborn! All the characters from the game are there! Hooray! They all love you and thank you for freeing them! Hooray! Happy ending!
You know who else is there? The Buddha!
"What?" you might be used to asking by now. And, yeah, Buddha is just kinda there. Symbolism!
Except wait! If you stare at the Buddha long enough, he turns into Jesus!! S-symbolism??
"WHAT?" you might be yelling, if you're like me.
So Everhood just goes ahead and casually conflates Jesus Christ and the Buddha. And here's what I have to say about that: Don't! Do not! Don't conflate religious figures like that!!
I think I can get a sense of what was going through the developers' heads. Jesus Christ is a figure of self-sacrifice, and you had to martyr yourself in the game by... killing everyone. Doing a lot of murders. Just like Jesus! It's like Matthew 5:38-40 tells us: "Kill them all, and let God sort them out."
And hey, the whole game is about death and rebirth, so let's throw the Buddha in there! That's who the Buddha is, right? Fat guy who reincarnates? Perfect! We already got a skinny guy who reincarnates, so that's basically the same thing. Slap 'em together! It can be a poignant message about how all religions are basically the same, when you think about it do no fucking research.
Admittedly, "they did no research" is a harsh thing for me to assume.
Gotcha! I know they did no research because they admitted it, in that same IGN interview with the writers/developers.
Though multiple sequences seem to call to mind specific philosophical traditions or schools of thought, Norgren says he had no specific ones in mind when he was making Everhood.
This is bullshit. You can't claim to have "no specific philosophical traditions in mind" when you're adding Jesus Christ and the Buddha to your game. You can claim that you didn't intend for your game to be about any one specific philosophical tradition or religion, but you can't pretend your repeated Buddha references merely emerged from the aether of your mindscape without you making a conscious decision to include Buddhism in your game.
I guess he could mean "I knew so little about Buddhism that any reference I made couldn't actually refer to its school of thought, because I'm not familiar enough with it to mean anything" which -- that's bad!! Know what you're saying maybe??
Rather, he was very focused on the idea of an endless journey or quest. He says he wishes he was more educated on some of the individual schools of thought, but then counters, "That would also defeat the purpose somehow, wouldn't it?"
NO.
NO, IT WOULD NOT "DEFEAT THE PURPOSE."
Being better educated about the sources you are drawing from is both the respectful thing to do and going to make what you produce better. Drawing from a place of understanding is going to produce deeper, truer material than your shallow assumptions ever could. That's always going to be true.
When you care about other people and other cultures, you enrich yourself, and that's going to enrich the things you create. When you don't care about other people and other cultures, you end up implying that Jesus Christ and The Buddha were basically the same person. This is just my opinion, but I personally believe that rich understanding is cooler than thoughtless dumb shit.
I don't think the writers were wrong for wanting to incorporate Christian or Buddhist imagery into the game, but I find it galling that Norgren found a justification to stay uneducated about the religions he was appropriating. I find that extremely crass. It's insulting.
Alright. With that out of the way, it's finally time to talk about them.
I'm finally ready to talk about Harrowed Haley.
