There’s no denying the impact that Undertale has had on the RPG genre, specifically in regards to how developer Toby Fox has influenced dozens of other indie creators to build their own game with mechanics, story, and visuals unlike anything you’d see in the triple-A landscape. The original Everhood is one such example. Developed by Chris Nordgren and Jordi Ruca in 2021, Everhood is an action RPG with battles driven entirely by music.
In order to succeed, players had to dodge and absorb attacks in equal measure, firing them back all to the beat of an intense backing track. The game was received quite positively upon release, though comparisons couldn’t help but be immediately drawn to Undertale, especially considering Everhood‘s more chaotic visuals and gameplay style.
Going into Everhood 2, as someone who’d never played the original but is a massive fan of the Undertale franchise, several questions were in the back of my mind during the game. For one, did the sequel meaningfully distinguish from its predecessor as well as other entries in the broader indie RPG scene? Secondly, did the game manage to balance style and substance, or were the scales tipped too far in one corner? After almost ten hours, the conclusion I came to is that Everhood 2 does many things right and many things wrong, and the answers to my questions ended up being more complicated than I expected.
An Unfamiliar Concept With a Familiar Execution
As I’ve said before, I have not played the original Everhood before playing its successor, so I was immediately hit with whiplash upon starting up the game for the first time. I was greeted with an immediately impossible boss fight, a fight with a “mind dragon,” conversations about enlightenment, and then a talking raven proceeded to save my life and tell me how to fight.
It’s an extremely bizarre opening that may take some people off guard at first, but I was immediately hooked. It’s so striking and does a great job of introducing players to the clashing tones they can expect in the next ten hours. The introduction is needed, as the mental limits of most people will be tested consistently throughout the game.
That whiplash I talked about in the start is fundamental to every single event in Everhood 2. There will be moments where a character that describes themselves as God explains how every NPC operates like puppets to them. In another, a cat who practices kung-fu will attempt to steal treasure from a kingdom of vegetables. In a scene later, an abstract being of light attempts to help the player character reach enlightenment, and in the very next, an actual PNG of Carl Jung speaks to a borderline abomination of colors.
I couldn’t help but cackle in laughter with the more bizarre story beats or stare open-mouthed at my Steam Deck in awe throughout the more esoteric scenes. However, as you play more, these clashing tones can often feel a bit disorienting. It doesn’t help that this concept of a narrative that flips back and forth between being really serious and really comedic isn’t exactly new, particularly for the genre.
On the subject of lack of originality, I did not find the visuals to be that impressive. They’re not bad by any means, and some absolutely incredible moments are unlike anything I’ve seen in a game before. On the other hand though, the overall visual art style doesn’t do anything impressive or new compared to the original Everhood or games such as Undertale, save for those few instances.
A lot of the environments are very simple and rely on monochromatic colors. The first area in the game, for example, which you’ll frequently be coming back to throughout the game’s runtime, relies primarily on neon lights and not much else. Later areas also aren’t that memorable or interesting, as they either stick with that direction or utilize familiar environment cliches from other games, such as a jungle level.
While these environments weren’t bad per se, I can’t remember anything about them even a few days after completing Everhood 2 for the first time. This applies to not just the level design, but also the music, characters, and narrative. Sticking with the graphics, though, the game often relies on psychedelic visuals which are usually more nauseating than profound.
These were just hard to look at, especially during the moment-to-moment gameplay, and despite being a key part of the franchise’s identity, they personally frustrated me more than anything. There are moments where the visuals will distort and warp, using a fish-eye lens or flashing colors that are extremely hard to look at. This issue would end up becoming more prevalent during the gameplay, but it was still not fun to look at during basic exploration. Overall, when it comes to the story, visuals, and overall surface-level identity of Everhood 2, it either has a style that is hard to look at, or uses design choices that lack any meaningful substance that make it stick out in comparison to similar titles.
This brings me to the gameplay, arguably the most interesting piece of the Everhood franchise’s identity. There are many moments where the mechanics clicked and became enjoyable in just the right way. Unfortunately, much like the overall visual and narrative identity in Everhood 2, these instances were often overshadowed by how frustrating the gameplay tended to be.
Chaotic, For Better And For Worse
The idea of a rhythm-based action RPG is brilliant. Sliding across a grid of five spaces, dodging color-coded attacks, then absorbing them to fire waves of energy right back at the enemy is extremely satisfying, especially in the first half of the game.
During the game’s opening hours, a majority of its first encounters do a great job of easing players into its unique gameplay. There are four main types of attacks that enemies can send your way, each represented by a specific color: red, blue, yellow, and green. Each colored attack can be absorbed and fired back at an enemy, but you can only absorb one color at a time.
To make things more complicated though, some attacks cannot be absorbed. Some can also act as a shield that will prevent you from firing the attack back along the path of the grid. Plus, if you get hit while accumulating energy for an attack, you’re set back to square one and are forced to begin collecting attacks once again. Due to these simple yet complex mechanics, you can’t help but start forming strategies in your mind on how to approach both encounters and boss fights.
Maybe you would prefer to absorb a large amount of energy, then fire it back in one giant attack, dealing devastating damage to any enemy in your path. If you choose this approach, you then run the risk of losing all of your attack power after one hit from said enemy. On the flipside, you can instead choose to absorb only a few attacks, then fire them back immediately afterwards. Sure, it may prevent you from dealing over a thousand HP worth of damage to an opponent, but it is far less riskier and will still fare well in most encounters.
The way the gameplay forces you to constantly reevaluate your strategies in order to survive battles and avoid damage is really compelling. The grid-like structure being reminiscent of the Guitar Hero franchise is also a great touch, and added that much more charm to Everhood 2’s mechanics. Even if I never quite clicked with the story and visuals, I still had a blast with a good portion of the gameplay.
Emphasis on “a good portion,” because despite my glowing praise for Everhood 2’s mechanics, I still had some major issues. First, there is the difficulty. After two to three hours, the difficulty starts ramping up more and more, and jumping to avoid attacks that are impossible to absorb becomes a harder task. My fingers were starting to cramp as I kept having to mash the jump button, to the point that most encounters were starting to look like Guitar Hero on the hardest possible difficulty. It’s worth noting though that I encountered this level of difficulty on easy mode, which makes the challenge even more baffling.
However, a lot of my problems with the game’s difficulty could easily be attributed to, for lack of a better term, “skill issues.” While I admittedly struggle with rhythm-based challenges that require quick reaction times, I found several instances of severe input delay. There would be points where I’d press a button to react to an attack with either a dodge or an absorb, and the game would not register in my inputs. Having your inputs not register in a rhythm game where every single input counts, this problem is, quite frankly, unacceptable, but there is more.
As mentioned previously, the visuals can often be extremely nauseating with how Everhood 2 will frequently lean on bright lights and psychedelia to establish its artistic identity. This applies to the gameplay as well, and it’s one thing to have sickening visuals when you’re walking at your own pace in an overworld, but it’s another thing entirely to see these when trying to focus on combat.
Encounters where the screen would actually spin around, flash bright lights, or warp at the edges were unironically vomit-inducing, and later encounters would reuse these frequently. While there is a toggle to disable the more intense flashes, I found that it did not solve the issue even a little bit. By the time Everhood 2 drew to an end, I was genuinely relieved to see the credits rolled because it meant that I didn’t have to deal with the obnoxious use of warping graphics anymore.
The most bizarre issue I encountered during my experience with the game’s mechanics is how little bearing “rhythm” had on the experience. If this were like any other rhythm game, you could time your jumps, dodges, and absorption operating entirely on just the sound and BPM of the backing track. Yet, I personally felt that this was impossible to do during Everhood 2, and timing attacks felt more like a fool’s errand than an acquired skill.
These issues built up throughout the game and ended up creating a gameplay loop that was more frustrating than fun. The unfortunate thing is that the quality I loved most about Everhood 2 ended up being tainted as a result of these problems. At the end of the day, the combination of said problems created a game that I still have mixed feelings about.
Lacking Any Real Rhythm
I really wanted to like Everhood 2. I’d heard good things about the first game in the series and I’ve always had a soft spot for RPGs that experiment with their art direction, narrative, and gameplay mechanics. From a distance, this assessment seems to match the game to a tee. In execution, though, the reality couldn’t be any more different.
Don’t get me wrong, Everhood 2 has some high moments. Some narrative beats and the way the story approaches ideas of “enlightenment” and religion are seriously captivating. Further, the gameplay is really fun in the first few hours and is filled to the brim with so much creative potential. These highlights are not enough to undo all of the problems I encountered throughout my playtime.
From inconsistent difficulty spikes that are heightened by the input delay to visuals that are downright nauseating, these issues with Everhood 2 were enough to detract from those instances where I really did enjoy the game. The narrative also doesn’t do enough to deviate from the formula you’d expect from other games in the genre, nor does it have any beats that are memorable in the long-term.
Overall, Everhood 2 is just okay. If more visual options are added in an update, alongside fixes for the input delay, then this will absolutely be a worthwhile game if you’re a fan of rhythm games, the original Everhood, or you’re feeling like broadening your indie RPG horizons. At the end of the day though, going back to the question posed at the beginning of this review, Everhood 2 doesn’t do enough with either its style or its substance to truly distinguish itself from similar titles.
Disclaimer: Foreign Gnomes provided Final Weapon with a PC review copy of Everhood 2 for review purposes.
