Evoland

Along with most other comments and reviews, I'm here to tell you to skip this one. The concept is of course very interesting, where you start as a basic computer program that you might create in a university project, and evolve into a more modern feeling game through the progression system. The many teases toward other critically acclaimed games makes it more fun as well but if that all sounds good to you, just take my word when I say even that can't save this game.

Been quite a while since I felt that a game wasn't simply a bad time, but a painfully disappointing experience that I was looking forward to playing until I actually got to. In theory this game sounded absolutely amazing, the idea of essentially playing through a short experience that took the player through a mini-history of games through having the player unlock changing elements of game design that would affect their session, but unfortunately, it ends up feeling very hollow. Evoland feels hindered by the fact that it didn't feel as if it were handled by people who were particularly interested at properly examining the changing landscape of video games as a whole beyond the most surface level observations, feeling more akin to someone having played like, 4 different series to any meaningful degree and just basing an entire game around that with a loosely conceived gimmick.

The entire way this game carries itself just feels really annoying and doesn't carry anything that feels remotely funny or clever in how it's expressed, feeling closer to a CollegeHumour video about games where it's just a string of the most shallow "parodies" one could put forth. A lot of these ideas simultaneously go too far and not far enough, the biggest example being the way in which the game attempts to make fun of pointless JRPG fetch quests that pad out the runtime. This part of the game is annoying, but doesn't actually do anything to separate it from any other annoying fetch quest that is being parodied, but with the added caveat of the writing being comprised of bland references or just nothing dialogue, making it impossible to even enjoy the usual benefit of such quests from adding a bit more to the worldbuilding or a character etc. This basically just creates a situation where rather than a parody of these quests, it instead is just exactly the thing it's satirising, but worse, and this design philosophy feels as if it carries over to the other bits of the game, where it doesn't feel as if there was enough of a fundamental understanding of a lot of what was being tackled here to actually make anything vaguely interesting.

It's a shame as well because this concept is absolutely full of potential to make something really funny that can get into the more abstract elements of game design and how it progressed over the years, informing the way Evoland's own design would change throughout its campaign, but instead it feels more like a string of outright worse versions of other games tied together with minimal flair attached. Even the concept of "unlocking chests progresses more meta aspects of games" ends up feeling closer to an alternate framing device to sending the player down a single, unchanging level rather than something that has any reason to exist, like, the game would play the exact same past the first 15 minutes or so with or without the gimmick attached. Talking about the first 15 minutes, you can def tell that this was just extended off a game jam game, as the initial concept is a bit clunky but actually handled really well for the most part as the player begins to unlock the most fundamental of mechanics and see how the simplistic design of the level can be recontextualised once you have more abilities to utilise, it's just a shame that the game falls on its face past this point.

On the whole, Evoland is a cool concept executed in a very banal, shallow way and I think it's really the kind of game that the designers in charge would need to be extremely tuned into both the subtle and larger ways in which gaming has changed over the years to make this work to its full potential. As it stands it's just a lame series of references tied together with a few horribly undercooked gameplay styles that all suck to interact with, and I'll consider myself lucky that it at least had the courtesy to only be a couple of hours long.