Switching to the modern 3D style lets us walk over the tiles, but blocks the way with bushes. In one area, 2D sprites can’t walk over certain tiles but can run through environmental background bushes. Some puzzles even have us switching back and forth between different genre styles - going “forward” or “backward” in era, so to speak - to pass by obstacles. Influences come from The Legend of Zelda, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy VII, and more. Evoland points out that we’ve seen this too many times We’ve learned to love or hate these things over the years, and Evoland makes it purposefully apparent why. Overused staples of the genre are unlocked: the boy chasing a butterfly around a well, the old hag who knows too much, the two halves of the amulet, the “telephone game”-style fetch quests. Battles shift from hack-and-slash to experience gathering, turn-based episodes. The music changes from bleeps and bloops to orchestrated symphonies. As the game’s adventure progresses, players are zipped through flashes of different gaming eras, stopping long enough just to say “Oh, I remember that!” It often brings out a smile, too.Īs the game unfolds we move from 2D sprites with excruciatingly simple controls to 16-bit sprawling overworlds, to full, HD, 3D models. Evoland functions like a walk through a museum, staring at paintings or sculptures of a bygone era, grabbing just snippets of what that time period actually meant. None of those details are actually integral to the experience. In reality, that’s probably fine for the game. There are few reasons to really explore the world The battles are unfulfilling and the puzzles are far too easy. There are few characters to interact with, few enemies to attack, and few items to collect. It’s short, lasting only a couple hours or so, and it doesn’t so much have a plot as it does a linear progression path to get to the next trope. Their latest game, Evoland, takes the RPG genre and examines its roots, often exposing how limiting and inaccessible they were at times, and celebrating some of the more fun cliches at others.Įvoland isn’t so much a game as it is a historical salvage of genre concepts, and so going into it looking for a mesmerizing experience will yield poor results. It’s not the actual technical aspects we remember, but our reactions to them. It all begins in monochromeĭeveloper Shiro Games probably had that same realization. And then I pop in an old dusty copy of Crystalis and realize that yeah, maybe the olden days really didn’t hold up as well as I thought. But nothing holds up to the classics,” I think. But somehow we still place classics on a pedestal, relying on the memories and experiences they invoke rather than the actual, technical aspects. That’s rarely the case, though, as any 80s cartoon will reveal. When we wax ecstatically about things from childhood, we tend to think they’d hold up their quality now that we’re adults.
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