Evoland 2

I went in half-expecting a novelty act and came out quietly moved by it. Evoland 2 is a Zelda-style top-down action RPG at its core, with protagonist Kuro sword-swinging his way through dungeons and charging up ally special attacks - Fina's wind blast, Menos's flaming ground slam, Velvet's ice shards - to solve both combat and environmental puzzles. That core is modest but solid. What makes the game feel like something else entirely is what surrounds it: a time-travel narrative that physically changes the art style and the genre of play depending on which era you occupy. The 8-bit past, the 16-bit present, the cel-shaded 3D future - each reads immediately as a different visual language, and Shiro Games earns real credit for tying those shifts to story logic rather than leaving them as arbitrary costume changes. The genre pivots are where Evoland 2 becomes genuinely hard to compare to anything else. Over the course of roughly 20 hours you will handle Zelda-style dungeon puzzles, side-scrolling platformer sections, a Touhou-lite vertical shoot-em-up, a Bomberman-mode bomb-laying stretch, a beat-em-up island, a stealth corridor that hands you a cardboard box (the party member's commentary about it is perfectly timed), a Professor Layton-style puzzle library, turn-based tactical battles with positional mechanics, and a Street Fighter-ish fighting game boss that will ask you to remember Ryu's quarter-circle inputs. That sentence is not exhaustive. The soundtrack by Camille Schoell mirrors every transition - chiptune to orchestral sweep and back - and the quality holds throughout. It is one of the better composed indie scores I have heard in this genre space. Not all of those borrowings land evenly, and the game is honest enough with itself to know it. The shoot-em-up section runs long, the active-time battle system in the lab encounters feels sluggish in a way that reads more like a faithful recreation of JRPG tedium than a loving wink at it, and the card-collecting minigame is the one piece of the puzzle worth skipping. Some puzzles wall the player off with mechanics that appear once and vanish, which can tip from charming to frustrating depending on your patience with trial-and-error. The early hours are also noticeably linear - shops gatekeep their own inventory - and the comedic referential writing, while often genuinely witty, occasionally leans too hard on a single pop-culture callback and forgets to be a joke. The fourth-wall moments that do land, though, land well. For players who grew up cycling through NES, SNES, and N64 libraries, Evoland 2 is the kind of game that makes the nostalgia feel earned rather than cynically deployed. It is not trying to be the best version of any one genre it visits. It is trying to be a warm, slightly chaotic love letter to all of them at once, and more often than not it succeeds. The Steam community has settled around an 88% positive rating from over 1,800 reviews, which feels about right - this is a game with rough seams and genuine charm in roughly equal measure, and the charm wins. If you can tolerate a game that changes the rules every hour and occasionally stumbles when it does, Evoland 2 rewards that tolerance with some genuinely inventive moments, particularly late in the game when the time-switching mechanics start to weaponize the 2D-to-3D plane transitions against you in ways that feel like Shiro Games flexing something original.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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