Everhood 2 has some big shoes to fill. Its predecessor, having now come out 4 years ago to the very day of its sequel’s release, borrowed the subversive, narrative-driven stylings of indie darlings like Undertale and retro legends like Earthbound to great effect. But it built itself around a zany yet thought-provoking story and a rhythm-game-adjacent battle system that resulted in one of the most fun and trippy experiences I’ve ever had gaming. It’s the sort of game you can just tell was not made with sober minds, and is all the better for it, with a psychedelic, experimental approach to design that always aimed to surprise and always succeeded.
So, how do you follow that up? I consider the original Everhood one of my favorite indies ever made. And it’s a game that constantly challenges your skills and expectations in increasingly ridiculous ways. But does Everhood 2 strike the right balance of iterating on its predecessor without taking away what made it so memorable? Believe it or not, that’s exactly what I’m here to talk about.
Perhaps aligning itself exactly with my expectations, Everhood 2 begins with a joyride of nonsense. The first thing you’ll see is a survey with questions that range from whether or not you’re a gamer who talks to every character in a room to if the questionnaire is boring you or not, all the way to asking if you’re afraid of death or if you’ve ever played Fortnite before. Some of these choices matter and some of them don’t, but it’s a fun way to start out that makes you question how it’s going to use this information. Did giving it my social security number and mother’s maiden name subtly affect something late in the game? I couldn’t wait to find out! Yes, that’s a joke.
Once this gentle interrogation is complete, you’ll gain control of your player character and pick up a stopwatch, which is one of the game’s key items that can be equipped to give an advantage during combat – in this case by giving you an extra life to use once you die. But somebody noticed you taking that stopwatch and isn’t especially happy about it – so begins your first “combat” encounter. The game’s first fight unfolds just like any early combat sequence from the original Everhood, where you’ll be dodging a series of notes on a Guitar Hero-esque track and doing your damned best not to get hit. But before long you’ll learn that Everhood 2’s battle system, while looking nearly identical to the original on the surface, is actually very different. Everhood was an adventure game with an almost boss rush-like format where each enemy had their own unique combat song.
And while you gained basic offensive abilities later in the game, most of the campaign had you doing a whole lot more dodging than fighting back. Everhood 2 unfolds more like a traditional RPG, with both smaller enemies and larger bosses populating explorable areas and each opponent having their own health bar to dwindle down with attacks. When playing with a controller, the right trigger will enable you to absorb most notes that are being cast your way and release them back at the enemy with the left trigger when you have enough.
The structure of combat is a unique risk-reward system that constantly adds stress the better you do. Enemy songs won’t naturally end after a set amount of time, but instead loop through themselves until you manage to whittle that enemy’s health bar down to zero. Absorbing just a few notes to beam back at the enemy will do a little bit of damage. Absorbing several notes to beam back will do a decent amount more damage – enough so that it’s worth saving up to tackle more of your enemy’s health bar at once. But absorbing a large note combo based on the bar that fills up at the bottom of your screen will allow you to shoot a super-charged beam of energy at your enemy that, if charged enough, could very well knock them out in one go.
There are even achievements for this. But there’s always a risk – get hit by any note while you’re building up your attack, or accidentally absorb a note of a different color (which is a very easy mistake to make), and you have to start your combo all the way back over with no damage being done. It’s a really cool system that incentivizes skillful play to build up the highest combo possible and make battles end sooner, though the length of a battle doesn’t especially matter as long as you survive it, given that your health usually regenerates between them.
As is typical for a more RPG-centric format, you’ll level up in Everhood 2 and gain weapons that can be upgraded as well. But very little of this progression ever felt impactful. There were some small changes, like the way leveling up your weapon a certain amount could have your medium-strength attack regenerate some health, but by and large my progression felt more like just a case of some numbers going up and very little else.
Some of you might be hoping to hear more about Everhood 2’s story, and I’m sorry to say I don’t have especially good news there either. I really enjoyed the story in the original game – while it jumped all over the place to introduce every imaginable type of weird, quirky character and silly gag to stay unpredictable, the structure always remained cohesive and had a philosophical undercurrent that gave it a little more meat. While Everhood 2’s story shares a lot of these same qualities, I don’t think it shares many of the strengths.
To be fair, I laughed out loud a good handful of times. The game starts with a raven who promises to retrieve your lost voice if you can kill the Mind Dragon, whatever that is. And powering yourself up to do so will have you working your way up the bracket of a gladiatorial juice tournament where you’ll slaughter vegetables for a chance to become the next Juice Master, or take advantage of homeless people who don’t know the worth of their meager assets, or start fighting a boss that immediately forfeits just because the developer thought that would be funny. It is funny. It remains funny. But something feels different, and that difference is a lack of any real structure.
Every new area, character, and gameplay diversion started to feel so excessively random at times that the plot gave the sense of putting together a jigsaw puzzle where all the pieces were sanded down to be the same size and shape. You can fit it together in any way you want because the foundation plays so fast and loose with its own trajectory that it might as well be completely improvised. That’s kind of exhausting. There just comes a point if literally everything is trying to be surprising and unpredictable, then nothing is because it’s easy to stop caring. Ultimately, Everhood 2’s length is part of that problem. At roughly 10-12 hours depending on how much you do, it’s a significantly longer game than the 6-8ish hour original and doesn’t feel like its plot is paced in such a way to do that length justice.
Broadly speaking, Everhood 2 has numerous issues like this where divergence from the original game’s structure and design has only served to weaken the overall experience rather than enhance it. This was at first hard for me to pinpoint – I struggled to figure out what was nagging at me so much while I was playing it, but after returning to the original Everhood for a couple of hours, I think I figured it out.
Everhood – talking about the original game now – is a tightly designed, briskly-paced game where there’s so much going on to make its battles feel unique, even though the gameplay within them was mostly very simple. It would randomly reverse the controls on you, it would start spinning the playing field all over the screen or duplicate tracks all over the place as though you’re playing the game through a kaleidoscope. It would have a random go-karting level or one where the track is actually a minecart that you only move forward by hitting buttons on the left or right of the screen. It throws so many ideas at you so frequently that not a single one has a chance to outstay its welcome. And its sometimes intense difficulty would frequently put me in a phenomenal flow state as I dodged obstacles with what felt like superhuman reflexes.
Everhood 2 does much of the same thing in some respects – there are enemies that introduce unique elements that totally change the way you play, or gameplay sequences unrelated to the main combat that pop up out of nowhere to bring in some variety. But these gimmicks are significantly less frequent, and some of them, like sequences where you have to awkwardly control a small rowboat, are just not very fun and are reused frequently enough to outstay their welcome. Some ideas, visual effects especially, feel borrowed wholesale from the original Everhood and don’t feel that unique or interesting as a result. I never thought I would be saying that the sequel to Everhood lacks variety, but… it really does lack variety. I was having fun most of the time, but on several occasions, I was just bored, and even its steady stream of silly jokes didn’t do much to alleviate that.
I did enjoy the new combat system, but not only does its added complexity feel like a hindrance to the experimental antics of the first game, but for some reason, the gameplay simply didn’t feel as tight. It always felt hard to fully judge when you have time to shift a row over and collect a note without it hitting you. It always felt hard to fully judge how long you’re able to hold down the absorb button to collect multiple notes in a row before you had to hit it again. And it even always felt hard to fully judge if a jump will actually clear over a note or not, resulting in times that I got hit which didn’t feel right – bafflingly so because jumping over notes is a mechanic from the first game that feels better in the first game. And though this lack of gameplay polish felt a bit off, most of the time it didn’t matter because on Medium difficulty, Everhood 2 felt significantly easier than the original game, with most enemies being easy to dispose of on my very first try aside from some small but sporadic difficulty spikes. As a result, I never hit that same flow state as I did in the first Everhood, which feels like a shame. If you want a harder experience, I’d strongly recommend you up the difficulty or else most battles are going to feel pretty trivial.
I don’t want to sound too sour here because I still thought Everhood 2 was pretty good. The problem is that “pretty good” as a sequel to “excellent” is going to come off as negative no matter how hard I try. This is simply a case of a sequel not having enough ideas to successfully posture itself as a bigger, better version of its predecessor, and arguably changing too much about what made the original great. Nearly every way that it tries to be different made it less fun for me and results in a game that’s, again, pretty good but rarely great, and may have been better off as a gentle evolution of the first Everhood rather than the mechanical re-imagining that it tries to be.
But let me make peace with that – Everhood 2 is a different game than Everhood 1. In my opinion, it is a much inferior game, but some may love the new RPG progression more than I did. What we can all probably agree on, though, is that the soundtrack is dope. Seriously, there are so many great tracks in Everhood 2 and it easily does the original justice with pretty much all of them. Visually, I’d say it’s about in line with the original and doesn’t take any broad leaps with its neon pixel art aesthetic, and it didn’t need to. Its whole presentation is, in contrast to some of the gameplay, a monument to not fixing what isn’t broken. And as one might expect, it plays fantastically on the Steam Deck with no issues whatsoever to report there.
There is still much to like about Everhood 2. Its battle system is unique, its presentation is great, its sense of humor knows how to tickle my funny bone just right sometimes, and there’s plenty of content here for those who want to see it. But without a doubt in my mind, a lot of what made the original game an all-time classic has been lost here. From repetitive combat to inconsistent mechanics to an aimless story and RPG progression that feels neutered at best, I cannot recommend Everhood 2 to anybody who hasn’t already played the much superior original title. For those who have, I would come into this with tempered expectations, but you’re still likely to have a good time.
GOOD
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