Everhood 2 Review
At the risk of making myself vulnerable, let me ask you a question: have you ever played a game that makes you feel, well, dumb? I’m not talking about extremely challenging puzzles like Lorelai and the Laser Eyes, nor am I talking about the tedium of trawling through too many spreadsheets in EVE Online. No, I’m talking about games that actually have something to say, but do so in a way that requires a bit more brain power than you’re perhaps ready (or equipped) for. Everhood 2 feels that way to me.
Fitting along the lines of something like Undertale or even Yume Nikki, Everhood 2 utilizes a type of dream logic where the player is often thrust into impossible humorous scenarios with odd creatures. The game leans heavily on questions about the soul, the self, and what happens before and after death. Complicated stuff that, frankly, my tiny brain isn’t quite able to dive into beyond a surface-level comprehension. To understand what I’m talking about, let’s start at the beginning.
When you start a new game, Everhood 2 asks you a series of questions. The questions can be skipped by telling the game that you’re bored, but if you choose to answer them, the questions can get a bit heavy, including questions about depression and self-harm. Thankfully, the game does ask if you’re prepared to answer those types of questions, and if not, skips over them. What these questions do (aside from setting the difficulty), I’m not entirely sure.
Afterwards, you’re tossed into the dream logic part right away. White rooms with objects you can’t interact with, a pit that leads into a black void, and an immediate confrontation with a shade entity that results in you nearly dying before being rescued by a talking, sentient raven. You’re soon whisked to a neon-light filled void, a hotel street that circles back in on itself, and a hotel with endless floors and number combinations to explore while being tutorialized on the combat.
The core combat gameplay of Everhood 2 isn’t complicated — it’s a rhythm game not unlike Guitar Hero or Rock Band, but instead of trying to hit every single note, you’re instead trying to chain together specific colors of notes and avoid others. There’s no real strategy to this except learning the notes (the song will repeat if left to go on long enough), hitting the absorb button at the right beat, and dodging or air-dashing at the appropriate time. If you get hit, you lose your combo, and the higher your combo, the more damage you deal.
Outside of combat though, what makes Everhood 2 a complete trip to go through is how the game frames its narrative. You are a self-named soul, stuck in the limbo between life and death. To leave, you must first prove your worth by defeating some foes, namely a “dragon”, but from there you need to “meet God”. Who qualifies as God is juggled between a few characters, but you quickly get the sense that limbo is not linear — and from there, I’m not sure where the story goes. There’s this overarching meta-narrative of “who qualifies as a god?” Are you a god inside your own mind? Do you experience true death when you die, or do your last remaining conscious experiences get twisted and stretched out into infinity as you’re dying?
I think those are some of the meta-questions the game is asking. Not trying to be condescending to myself, but I am an idiot. I genuinely do not understand these concepts beyond the surface-level recognition. While exploring the hotel, for example, I encountered an art room. In the middle was an NPC that waxed prophetically at me about art, hallucinations, drugs and drug therapy, and how that contributes to the artist and their sense of self when creating art. The exposition was several minutes long and, to be honest, I didn’t grasp it thoroughly. If the intent was to get you thinking about these topics, it certainly did, but I can't be certain I understood them. Perhaps you can’t, or that’s not the point. Or perhaps I’m overthinking everything. I couldn’t tell you what it was about because once you leave that room, as far as I know, you can never return.
One sequence has you time-travelling to an alien planet. You first arrive and free a bunch of enslaved aliens. You then visit them as their civilization progresses throughout the game — first to a modern day civilization where they create a device that allows transdimensional travel, then to a futuristic, hyper-optimized utopia where they create an AI machine god (that then initiates a mass-extinction level event, killing everything in sight), then to a post-apocalyptic world where the remaining aliens are the result of the machine god splicing their DNA to create life (before the machine god left the planet searching for more lifeforms to torture), and then finally to a nearly desolate version of the planet where the aliens coalesced their remaining life into a soul weapon (that you can then take with you on your adventure.) It’s very poignant, and evokes several emotions, but its place in the grander narrative of the game is unclear (beyond giving you a soul weapon, of course.)
This is very thought-provoking stuff, but the game isn’t always meta-narrative “makes you think” type exposition. There’s also things like a mushroom that farts everytime you hit it, the random appearance of a mushroom version of moistcrit1kal making his “WOOO” noise, Dunkey (yes, that Dunkey!) threatening to fight you but then never actually doing so, the ability to turn sentient combat vegetables into paste, and more non-sequiturs. The combination of meta-narrative and jokes evokes Undertale and Deltarune, but not quite the same way.
Which makes reviewing this game fairly difficult. Can I truly review a game I do not fully understand beyond the surface level themes and tropes I comprehend? On a technical level, yes I can review the game: the hit detection for the combat can be sometimes a little iffy, even on the Story Mode difficulty, which makes it sometimes irritating, but never enough to say that it’s busted or broken. Sometimes the translation is a little suspect, with sentences that don’t quite make sense or utilize incorrect grammar. Sometimes the game's impressive use of battle scene transitions and psychedelic effects break the audio/video syncing, but it always corrects itself after a few seconds. Including those issues, however, the game is responsive, fun, has great music, great visual splendor, and generally was a treat to experience.
But beyond the technical? I genuinely don’t feel like I qualify to accurately review this game. My gut feeling is that Everhood 2 is trying to engage with metaphysical concepts in a somewhat humorous, often opaque way, but beyond that it washes over me. The game part of Everhood 2 is fun and a pixelated spectacle, of course, but a game is more than just gameplay, and a review should consider all the parts that make a game a game.
If you’re wondering if Everhood 2 is for you, there is a demo that gives you a bit of an idea of what to expect. If after playing you’re still unsure, I don’t know if there’s something I can say to give you an accurate idea. Everhood 2 is at times wacky, poignant, frustrating, confusing, high-brow, low-brow, and everything in between. It truly is unlike any game I’ve ever played, and it’s a game that will stick with me forever. But whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing, I don’t really know. I keep wondering that if I were more learned, or perhaps more studied in the topics this game is attempting to engage me with, I’d have more thoroughly enjoyed it, but that isn’t the case.