Everhood

I went into Everhood expecting an Undertale clone with a fresh coat of paint, and I came out the other side staring at the ceiling thinking about immortality. That is the thing this game does better than almost any indie in recent memory: it uses its absurdist exterior as a delivery mechanism for something considerably darker underneath. You play as Red, a mute wooden doll whose arm has been stolen, and what starts as a breezy fetch quest through a carnival world populated by chatty lampposts and vampires with head colds quietly becomes a meditation on eons of boredom, the cost of mercy, and whether ending suffering is heroism or cruelty. The world's inhabitants are eons-old immortals who have mostly lost their minds from sheer existential fatigue, and the game trusts you to piece that together from environmental details and throwaway NPC lines rather than spelling it out. I respect that enormously, and I also understand why some players will bounce off it hard. The combat is the star, and it is unlike anything else I have played. Battles happen on a five-column grid where Red stands in the foreground and enemies fire colored waves synchronized to the music. You dodge by moving left and right across lanes or jumping, reacting to the shape and height of each projectile rather than hitting notes on the beat - a distinction that trips up anyone with Guitar Hero muscle memory baked in. Early fights are forgiving enough to feel casual, but the system snaps into focus once you acquire the ability to catch and reflect attacks back at enemies, shifting the dynamic from pure evasion to something with genuine tactical texture. Later encounters layer in tilting boards, screen distortion, psychedelic visual noise, and full-on perspective warps that make gauging distances genuinely tricky. Photosensitivity warning is not performative here - some fights are aggressively lysergic. Five adjustable difficulty levels tweak health regeneration rather than altering note patterns, which is an honest accessibility design choice, though it also means the hardest content stays brutally hard regardless of settings. The soundtrack spans jazz, metal, funk, and electronic genres, and almost every track is tailored to the character you are fighting. A goblin on a dancefloor gets a chaotic drum machine flood. A trash can gets flamenco. The ATM you battle to scrape together nightclub entry money gets buzzing electronic noise that zig-zags across the board. It is consistently inventive and occasionally transcendent. Where the game wobbles is in character depth: the cast is broad but deliberately flat, which has thematic justification once the lore clicks into place, but in the moment it can feel like you are not given enough time with anyone to care. The first act in particular moves quickly from encounter to encounter without letting any single character breathe. If your emotional attachment to a playthrough depends on bonding with specific NPCs the way Undertale lets you, Everhood will feel thin. If you are the type who re-reads item descriptions and replays to catch missed dialogue, the second act and New Game Plus open up considerably, with optional secret fights, hidden lore, and at least one ending that requires a commitment so absurd it is almost a joke at the player's expense. At roughly six hours for a first run, there is no filler to complain about, which is genuinely rare. No padded XP grinds, no fetch quest chains that exist purely to stretch playtime. The overworld movement is a minor friction point - the default walk speed is slow and sprinting feels awkward - and the narrative's deliberate vagueness will frustrate players who want their themes delivered clearly rather than assembled from fragments. But these are complaints that dissolve in context of what Everhood actually is: a small, strange, philosophically ambitious game that earns its 95% Steam rating by doing something most big-budget RPGs do not attempt.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

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