Review | Everhood 2 | Sacrifice Time, Reality, And Ego To Enter Duality

Epilepsy Warning

Everhood and Everhood 2 contain persistent violent flashing lights and distorted images. If you have photosensitive epilepsy, it is strongly urged that you exercise extreme caution before attempting to play either game.

Intro

I often find myself drawn to the challenging rhythm games that surface over time. It has something to do with the flow and bullet hell elements that tickle the brain in the right ways, that never keeps me away for long. The thrill they bring is intoxicating, especially when creativity is thrown into the mixture to help break up that repetitive feeling of playing a similar game in a different visual skin. 

Everhood 2 will leave your mind blown with hallucinogenic visual imagery and thought-provoking subjects concerning life, death, the soul, existence, consciousness, time, and reality. Its predecessor, Everhood, focused on challenging no-hit gameplay, which I eagerly anticipated from its follow-up right until release, only to see it replaced with a new one-shot system. The more I played Everhood 2, the more it felt like a representation of a developer’s journey through the effects of the psychedelic realm of mind-altering substances, written down and encoded into a game.

The result is a sensory overload, blending incomprehensible topics as the game toys with your brain in all the right and wrong ways. As enjoyable as it was, it left me feeling more lost than I have been with any game. This is not a game for casual players looking for a relaxing session. Compared to its predecessor, Everhood 2 places a much heavier emphasis on its trippy elements, toning down the difficulty and taking the experience to a new level of visual intensity. While this may appeal to some, it’s arguably one of the game’s weaker aspects. Between the jokes, meme sound effects, internet references, and characters based on historical figures and internet celebrities, I’m unsure what to think.

Story

I struggled to piece together a story that felt whole. But perhaps there wasn’t one there to begin with. The deeper I delved into this mind-bending journey, the more I questioned what was real. That being said, it helped that I was familiar with the first game, especially its themes of immortality. 

So here is a rough explanation: Everhood 2 documents many historical figures, like psychologists, who end up deep in discussion with entities inhabiting dimensions around the mind and body. One moment, you're fully immersed in the rhythm gameplay; the next, you're elbow-deep in a lecture with Carl Jung pondering the meaning of life, while Ghengis Khan runs through the halls, followed by Rasputin blocking your way in his drunken stupor, only to be pulled back into the present-day culture of memes. 

These meditations on the topics of life and references to memes often lacked solid structure or foundation within the game itself, seeming absurd to an outside observer. While some of these entities’ statements could carry an intrinsic meaning and resonate on a much deeper level for those who’ve opened their minds, especially when under the influence, I personally could not rationalise them in any way, shape, or form.

The original Everhood feels like a fragmented mind, requiring players to piece together their understanding of what's happening. This isn’t difficult because the game has a clear beginning, middle, and end, along with a defined goal to achieve. After multiple playthroughs, players collect the necessary pieces to form a narrative that makes the most sense based on their in-game experience. The game felt like a dimension of endless suffering, and never-ending regrets, driven by a player's curiosity that, while innocent, brought chaos to its inhabitants. 

In contrast, Everhood 2 starts with a much more directionless approach. It’s technically a sequel, but it feels like it isn’t. From start to finish, the story is all over the place, introducing new characters, bringing back old ones, bombarding the player with fake endings, and delving into drawn-out topics like life, death, existence, and the nature of consciousness. The game’s sense of time and reality is so warped that narrative progression becomes distorted, making it feel like a fever dream that grows more bizarre the further it pushes forward. It’s possible that was the intention: to confuse and befuddle the player until nothing could be formulated as a story or pieced together. It can be a bit much as you struggle through the same gameplay for fifteen hours or so, repeating the same bosses, monsters, and songs until you ultimately uncover the solutions that allow for meaningful progression. During my playthrough, I saw the ending credits nearly 30 times. If the credits aren't the end, how does the player know when the game ends?

I went in expecting a story alongside the gameplay. Instead, I got a ten-minute lecture on why we are here, drawn from the perspective of an interdimensional being in an art gallery, someone who has reached a higher plane of existence. There was a lot of this: conversations with characters that felt completely out of place. It felt more like a joke with how many characters were revealed through hard-to-access secret cameo references, which would only show up after the player entered a specific six-digit access code used with an elevator’s manual override, offering endless secrets to discover, or so the game claims.

Everhood 2 is a sequel, so, where are all the other characters from within Everhood? Why is it just Sam, our yellow-eyed feline friend who played Tennis with the player on the Smega Entertainment System, or Irvine, the unseen rat hidden away in a portion of the game that only explorative players would discover? These were the questions I kept asking myself as everything came together. Even with knowledge of the events that took place within Everhood, it still takes time to fully understand. There is also the reappearance of the lost spirits, doomed for all eternity, but they don’t seem to play big roles here.

Presentation 

Everhood 2 does a good job of presenting a world that gradually unfolds. You begin in a state of confusion, slowly uncovering a breadcrumb trail of secrets that leads to a clearer, more cohesive understanding over time, to a point. The bulk of the experience is consumed by bright, flashing colours, distorted visuals, misleading endings, and pathways that often lead you astray. All the while the game is persistently edging you forward through taunts and half truths, spiraling you deeper into insanity as your mind stagnates in the haze of confusion. It’s intoxicating. You’ll feel genuinely compelled to keep going, fully aware that there’s certainly to actually uncover, yet you’ll keep searching for days, hoping to find something that isn’t there. 

While I admit that Everhood 2 was a unique and thought-provoking experience, I was not impressed. I felt nothing but confusion through the game’s use of visuals and story, as it lacked clarity to help ground the player in a stable reality of understanding. Compared to the original, Everhood 2 lost much of the simplicity that made the first game so impactful. 

Everhood took a more thoughtful approach to gameplay, secrets, and emotional depth. It made everything feel meaningful. In contrast, Everhood 2 feels like a chaotic blend of frustrating elements, overloading the player with sensory input in an attempt to impress and also to misdirect. When a cohesive idea is forming, the game often throws a curveball, shattering it into pieces. Surprisingly, it didn’t resonate with me as much, which is odd since I'm normally drawn to these types of features that really mess with the player’s head.

Gameplay

This commentary reflects my multiple playthroughs, which spanned twenty hours of gameplay of Everhood 2. I’d like to mention that I’ve completed numerous Everhood 1% no-hit encounters, which spanned sixty hours, finishing the fights without taking any damage both through genocide and pacifist runs. These achievements are extremely rare, with only a few players having unlocked them since the game’s release in 2021. I also delved into the game's underlying mechanics, and explored its multiple endings. I felt like this feeling of success and progression was missing from Everhood 2, due to the game’s new elements.

Everhood 2 introduces a new system where you’re asked various questions in the very beginning that shape your “soul colour.” Surprisingly, my favorite colour is blue, and I enjoy the assassin playstyle the game associates with the hue, so seeing my soul colour turn blue felt like things were going my way for once. Your soul colour holds significant meaning that you gradually piece together with time as you explore this distorted world and its equally distorted characters, hopping between realities of space and time to try to end this nightmare once and for all. 

The game did imply that some of these questions would influence certain aspects of the story. I didn't notice much change or difference other than obtaining a different soul colour, which changes the sprite; if there was an underlying secret, I couldn't figure it out, but you can be sure the Everhood community will. 

The combat wasn’t particularly demanding, though it was visually more distorted than in the prior game. Notes fall toward the player, who must jump to avoid damage and regenerate health after a few seconds without taking hits, unless it’s a specific boss fight. In those cases, you have a few options: play with more challenge by using fully charged power shots to take a given boss down in one hit without receiving damage, or take your time and use special effects that can consistently heal you when stacked up to ten.

The goal here is to match your weapon’s soul with the “notes” that fall from the top of the screen in various colours, which you can do by switching between your weapons while in combat. As you progress, you unlock power-ups that grant maximum damage output for your weapons. Choosing the right colour for each weapon boosts its base damage tremendously: for example, the green spear works best with green notes, the blue daggers with blue notes, and the axe with red notes. There are other options if you can find them hidden away, which offer bonus damage with brown and purple notes. Although slightly weaker, the additional special effects that these weapons can offer to the player still make them viable options.

As for the music, much of it, while good, felt repetitive. The combat followed the same pattern, with many of the same enemies littering the areas you explore, especially if you tackled multiple playthroughs, since this game on average needs to be played around seven to eight times to unlock hidden features. Whether it was a one-on-one battle or a multi-encounter, enemies would persistently cycle through one looped song and attack pattern one after the other, leaving a bit more to be desired. 

Since we’re dealing with a rhythm game, it should stand to reason that some tracks would get more spotlight than others, right? Well, that’s tough to say. While the character designs were fantastic, showcasing just how well the small team behind Foreign Gnomes Studio can produce pixel-art content, the songs are often chopped up and layered with static and other distorted effects, making it hard to enjoy them or for many to leave a lasting impression. Countless tracks in the original game resonated well with the world and the player, whether through their connection to the journey, eeriness, or psychedelic vibes. It was much more memorable and more fun to engage with.

Everhood 2 plays the same loud tracks over and over. It’s rarely quiet until you’re fully alone, with a lot of white noise that overloads the senses. I could definitely pick out a handful of songs introduced by boss fights that were pretty good, but outside of those, nothing stood out.

Over time, this repetition felt drawn out and exhausting as the hours passed by. As I tried my best to stay awake through the fights that I had passed through for the twelfth time to see if what was being presented to me was the true ending or just another distorted truth, I found myself wondering if I was missing something else entirely, which did fuel more desire to explore, but with much lower overall interest.

Beyond the physically and visually demanding gameplay, it's difficult to pinpoint exactly what Everhood 2 is about. You'll find yourself walking and running through hallways, dance clubs, and secret elevator rooms, each filled with content creators, memes, and more. These elements added more to the confusion, making it hard to identify a direction or real purpose.

If the player focused solely on the rhythm gameplay in Everhood 2 and ignored the story, they’d likely spend three to four hours playing, but would probably feel dissatisfied after the first “fake” ending. They’d be stuck in a loop replaying long, distorted corridors, timed events, and repetitive battles, with little progress until the cycle finally breaks, only to start again from the beginning. For me, it wasn’t a feature I particularly appreciated. But then again, I did come in expecting a continuation of the previous adventure.

Conclusion

While I’ve consistently praised Everhood for its creativity, Everhood 2 was hard to follow. The sequel’s story felt too confusing, with countless topics appearing out of nowhere, seemingly for no reason other than to serve up meme references and evoke mind-bending philosophical concepts. At its worst, it elicits a lingering sense of unease and fear that we may never truly understand the meaning of life, let alone why it is so intrinsically intertwined with the world of video games.

Everhood 2 didn’t feel like a sequel. Instead, it felt more like a story about the player’s consciousness, rather than continuing some form of narrative with the original game, which admittedly makes sense considering how that game ended. I was hoping for more of a challenge, story, and lore, but I came up empty-handed. Even if I were to shift my perspective and treat it as a separate spin-off, it would still have made no sense. Perhaps going in with a sense of continuation was a bad approach and instead one should treat it as they would treat any new game, as a new experience into the unknown. 

I can’t quite put into words how the game made me feel. I went in excited, eager to uncover its secrets. Every single one I found triggered many thoughts that caused brief moments of anxiety, pulling me out of what would otherwise have been a very immersive and fun rhythm bullet-hell gameplay.

It's a game I'll have to revisit when I'm prepared to overstimulate myself for another twenty hours to complete some of the tougher challenges and possibly uncover more secrets that may have been hidden behind some one-hit encounters or an elevator code that unlocks more answers. In the meantime, I'll need to take a break from it because it was too much for my mind.