40.1 hours played
Written 18 days ago
[i] What are you doing here? You're not supposed to be here... [/i]
Everhood is a psychedelic wonderland dressed in blackness, the magical and beautiful atmosphere of it's world shinning bright colorful light through cracks and slits in the velvet black that shapes it. Only when the drapes of darkness part do you see the "real world". The color in the light that would blind if not obscured by The Dark. A Twilight Ballet. An Elegy of Chaos and Order. A Tango between Life and Death.
There are many hidden truth's. One of those hidden truths is that there is more to this Ineffable Tale than just a game. There is something deeply therapeutic in progressing through and processing the plot while you dance, dodge, and fight your way through a barrage of notes being thrown at you by the inhabitants of Everhood. It requires intense focus and rhythm to make it through some of these songs, but once you find the groove Red begins to feel like an extension of yourself and navigating through the notes feels like your gliding on the frets. In a way Everhood helps me achieve a deeply meditative state that I can only compare to being at first in the eye of the storm to then becoming the storm in full force.
The gameplay is a unique and innovative take on classic rhythm game mechanics, it's familiar but unlike most rhythm games you find yourself avoiding the notes rather than hitting them. Combat mechanic are introduced about halfway through the main plot of the game (I say "main plot" as there are several alternative endings, which I implore you to explore) and add a dark twist to the plot that leads you to question "Am I the bad guy?"; and I don't mean "is the character I am playing as the bad guy?" I mean "am /I/ the bad guy"?
Whenever I launch Everhood, I find myself absorbed in the world, it has this way of holding my focus in such a way that for a moment nothing else around me exists. It's just me and the gnomes. Yet when I come out of it, somehow I always feel like I have fresh new perspectives on things that were clouding my thoughts. It brings clarity.
All in all Everhood has carved out a little place for itself in my heart, and I am happy to have it rest there. It is worth so much more than the $20 it costs to buy, and if you are a completionist there are No Hit achievements for every fight and they will keep you VERY busy. There is something deeply sad and relatable in our (mostly) silent puppet protagonist. The Tale makes a very subtle point that humans can feel very contradictory emotions in tandem. Such as having awe and disgust, or glee and fear. It is easy to get swept away by the hypnotic beats and bright colors, but it is hard not to feel for the tortured souls that lie within the Everhoodian denizens. Especially Red; "The Red Marauder". At a certain point, you just want to let him rest, he doesn't want to be the bad guy, and you don't have to make him into one.
With life comes death, with death comes suffering. All life entails some degree of suffering, but through that suffering you grow. You can look at yourself trapped in a life of suffering or you can learn to dance with the madness and enjoy the world's greatest play. You can be still. Your perspective will largely shape what Everhood is about between playthroughs and even scenes. A major message I got from Everhood is that You don't want to be the "bad guy" but even being the "sort of okay guy" takes some work, and being the "good guy" means making hard choices. Hard choices that you usually can't make twice.
((Also; this might just be me, but when I play for over an hour - retrying the same fights over and over and over again, and then pause it or exit out of the game and look away from the screen everything in the real world starts to kinda breathe, wobble, and shift around a bit, 10/10 video game induced optical hallucination. I am so here for it))