[Game Review] Evoland

One of my primary criticisms of The Outer Worlds (and Bethesda RPGs in general) was in how it felt a lot more like an amusement park ride than it did an RPG.  Part of this comes from the general ethos of the genre.  RPGs are meant to give you people, cultures, places, and stories to explore and sink yourself into, and that immersion is easily broken when the machinery is showing.  What makes Evoland so fun and interesting is that it is an amusement park ride rather than an RPG.  You aren't being immersed in a world (the story and characters are intentionally trite, referencing a wealth of RPG plots and mcguffins) as a sense of place so much as a museum of style, technology, and loving references to games of the past.

Evoland's gimmick is in using chests to unlock newer technology as the game progresses.  Starting with GameBoy era graphics and sound, you eventually move up to the 16-bit stylings of the SNES, early PSX/N64 graphics (although, without my favorite lack of anti-aliasing and wobbly polygons), and upwards to about PS2 quality (with one, Diablo III referencing level briefly bumping us up a generation or two).  Likewise, gameplay pings between early Zelda to SNES era Final Fantasy to mid-era Zelda to eventually something like . . . God of War? I'm not sure exactly what you would call the final boss.  Unlocking the newer graphical interfaces and renderings is one of those nostalgia baiting things that could easily be criticized, but I found myself charmed by Evoland's skipping through memory lane, and partially that was due to wondering exactly how far they were going to go.
The issue with Evoland is that it is only the bare minimum of a game.  You do have to confront bosses, use potions, level up, and interact with NPCs, but it's more suggestive of a game than a challenge.  I died quite a few times through Evoland, but a large part of that was because of a slight lack of comfortable game feel (attacking feels a bit finicky, as does moving, but I'm not judging it too harshly as this is plainly not where the game was trying to focus my attention).  Since combat and mechanics keep changing, there isn't much time to really explore anything, so the mechanics introduced are pretty much always the simplest, most boiled down feel of an old system (like a Final Fantasy type party system) without any of what made those systems interesting.  It's like a flavor platter, a taste test through history perfect for those who know a lot about the history of RPGs and those who want to learn (although the context to each style and mechanic won't be given to you, you can still get a brief, simple feel for what they are meant to invoke or ask of you).  All of this makes it that much more frustrating when they introduced an actually interesting mechanic late in the game where you are able to switch between eras of game in order to solve one puzzle.  Knowing there is an Evoland II and that it is much longer helps weaken my annoyance, but even then that's a shitty cop-out to what is an underdeveloped mechanic, and one that seems more exciting than anything else in the game.

Evoland is a novelty, and that isn't always a bad thing.  It's sweet, it's reaffirming to those with our hobby, and while all of that can be a severe criticism, Evoland has managed to slip by with just the right amount of charm and brevity.  Sometimes a love letter is a pandering experience, but once in awhile it feels as though those who composed it have as much love as those who received it.



7.0