Everhood

Everhood: An Ineffable Tale of the Inexpressible Divine Moments of Truth is as if Undertale and Guitar Hero had a rebellious son who became a drug addict obsessed with death. I don’t want to elaborate.

But it’s my job, so here I am, elaborating. For you. The first minutes of Everhood: An Ineffable Tale of the Inexpressible Divine Moments of Truth (I promise to never write the whole title again) immediately set the irreverent tone of the adventure. “Do you agree to abandon Humanity, Time, and accept Immortality?” a voice asks us, and if we dare to answer “no,” we’re just kicked back to the start screen. Everhood knows we’re there, playing it, and it wants to play with us too, teasing and taunting us at every turn.

So, we oblige. We accept immortality and see a lifeless doll, whose arm is being stolen by a thief dressed in blue — who will be later ingeniously referred to as the Blue Thief —, suddenly gain life and wake up. They’re called Red, they’re dressed in red, and they’re seeing red because someone stole their arm. We must set off into the world to catch the darn Blue Thief dressed in blue, but here is the rub: the world of Everhood is crazy.

And not because it’s populated by quirky monsters that say things that barely make sense. It’s the look of Everhood, its use of colors — especially black — that imbue every place and situation with an off-putting dream-like quality. Our surroundings and the ground are all pitch-black, for example, making us feel like we’re walking over a dark, endless void, with just a few spots of color to indicate the way, like a treacherous trail of bread crumbs left by a witch to lead us to her house of sweets. Take the place where Red wakes up: we can only see it’s a forest because the negative space in the background forms the shape of trees. The effect is otherworldly, turning this world into an abstract, intangible place, where we can’t be sure of anything, not even the ground beneath our feet.

We soon come across a frog with a brown straw hat and a wooden guitar, who seems friendly despite the rudeness of saying we lack an arm: “Hmm, it seems you are missing an arm,” he ingeniously points out, but he also advises us to “Stay away from cats, they are all trouble,” and cats are cool, so what does he know?

The combat system, it turns out. He’s afraid that we can’t fend for ourselves — lacking an arm and all — so the frog proposes to teach us how to fight, or better, how to survive fights, which all boast a unique music track. Here, I must ask you to imagine Guitar Hero, with its button prompts coming down on a track at increasingly faster speeds in increasingly insane patterns. Now imagine that the protagonist is at the bottom of the screen in said track and that those prompts are actually light projectiles that damage them, which means that we must avoid them like crazy instead of chasing them down —  and we do that by pressing left or right to move between lanes or the jump button the get over the projectiles. It’s more bullet hell than a rhythm game, then, but with said hell being ruled by a demented musical Satan.

It seems simple at first with the Frog fight, but oh boy, don’t those increasingly insane patterns of light projectiles go totally insane sooner than you’d expect, even if you ingeniously expected them to go totally insane sooner rather than later. The first proper battle is just a few steps away, for example, and is already quite crazy. We must enter a club to catch the Blue Thief, but we’re just an armless doll dressed in red who, in their most relatable trait, has got no money in their pocket. Luckily for them, right next to the club’s entrance, there’s an ATM. Unluckily for them, that acronym stands for Automated Terror Machine, who is very hungry and wants to eat their s o u l.

So, we fight it by avoiding their increasingly insane patterns of light — and they get increasingly insane, believe me — until the ATM gets tired and lets us go with some cash. Inside the club, we meet various characters, such as Noseferatchu, who seems to suffer from a terrible allergic rhinitis, and a red mushroom on the dance floor, who laments how no one wants to play hide and seek with them in the woods. Hansel and Gretel would probably have loved to, for all the good that would have done them.

Eventually, we manage to get to the VIP lounge — after overcoming another foe’s increasingly insane light patterns, which once again get really insane really fast — and we find the Blue Thief, who is meeting with a big, ugly pig who is as big as he is ugly. There’s “mob boss” written all over its big, ugly face, you see. Do you know how sometimes looks don’t match someone’s character — don’t judge a book by the cover and all that — well, this isn’t the case. This big, ugly pig is a big, ugly bastard who tries to kill us almost immediately by throwing us into an incinerator. And we indeed perish horribly. We indeed die. Incinerators usually do that to you. But luckily for us, we accepted immortality early on. Unluckily for us, that comes at a price.

This all happens in the first twenty minutes or so, and it’s when the increasingly insane patterns of light projectiles stop getting increasingly insane, because they get totally bonkers, batshit Jellicle, downright lunatic, redefining the concept of unhinged. It’s sheer unmitigated madness in the shape of crazy patterns of light projectiles. Mr. Mistoffelees would be proud, it’s what I’m saying: our character has just died when we’re suddenly bombarded with sublime imagery — as if we were traveling through space and time after falling through a wormhole, seeing stars being born an dying without the chance to yell at our kid behind a timeless bookcase — and then, before we know it, we’re in the middle of combat, fighting a single gnome in a dark void…but then there are many gnomes, then they are playing tennis with their own heads, then their heads are being thrown at us, then there are hundreds of gnomes in the background in a shining spinning spiral, then there’s Budda in the background, and he’s spinning too and his mouth is shining, and that’s before things stop making sense.

The patterns of light projectiles that we must avoid here are already ridiculously aggressive for — let’s check notes — the third fight after the Frog tutorial, but then Everhood decides we can take it and throws everything at us. And I mean everything: the lights start to explode in more gnomes, obscuring our view, while the track itself begins to tilt and our character starts to leave a blurred image in their place when they move, the ground itself also becoming a blurred mirror of the action, whose reflections stay in place and stack with each other, making it seem like we are either losing our Nintendo Switch or the last remnants of our sanity (maybe both, why not both). Then the whole screen becomes pitch black except for the dangerous patterns of light — the game is the most impressive showpiece of the inky blacks of an OLED screen I’ve ever seen — and we start to wonder if we’re legally allowed to recommend experiencing this whole sequence under the influence of mushrooms. After playing hide and seek with them in the forest, of course.

In other words, it plays out like a chaotic final boss fight in a deeply lysergic game, but — let’s recheck notes — it’s just the third battle after the tutorial during the game’s prologue.

Yes, you read that right. Prologue. Yeah.

And now, with that out of the way, Everhood: An Ineffable Tale of the Inexpressible Divine Moments of Truth (I lied, people lie, it’s what they do, unfortunately) can properly start.

There are doors, I can say that much. And we pass through them and go places. Weird, crazy places. Meet weird, crazy people, too. Like a fairly big goldfish who says “blubb”, which roughly translates to, “I feel that I’m destined to do great things in life.“I wish I could share your optimism, Goldfish. I truly do.

We find more increasingly insane patterns of light projectiles, of course, but rest assured that not all set-pieces here are about that. We race on karts one time, and in another inspired moment, get to play a lengthy tabletop RPG session with some side characters, including a major antagonist, who’s acting as dungeon master and having his narrative choices being constantly judged by the other players. Everhood’s first half is brimming with energy and creativity, having lots of quirky surprises on its sleeve, so that we can never guess what’s waiting for us behind the next door.

Especially since the dreamlike logic never goes away. On the contrary, it ingeniously permeates every line of dialogue, every action, every insane pattern of lights, every door. Our companion in the middle of the adventure stops to say, “I don’t remember why we are here. What we are doing.” And honestly, at that time, neither could I.

And to expand this feeling of unfathomable mystery, this is a game brimming with secrets. Remember how the ground looks like a dark void, and our surroundings look like a dark void, because this whole world seems to exist over a dark void? We soon learn that darkness can hide secret passageways, that we should not always follow the witch’s bread crumbs, but go out of the way and explore to come across new characters, locales, and items. Maybe even some secret fights with secretly insane patterns of light projectiles. And remember how Everhood is aware of us as players? Well, it loves to troll us and make us doubt our actions: one of the secret endings, for example, is only unlocked if we blindly cross a single endless corridor for – brace yourselves – three to four hours.

Everhood’s second half, on the other hand, is different. There’s a new mechanic that shakes things up: we’re not dodging light projectiles anymore, but coming right for them. Now, we’re the menace. We’re getting increasingly insane. And the tone changes accordingly, becoming much more somber, even melancholic at times: no one is laughing anymore, no one is playing games. When we enter a door, it’s to find — and maybe even propagate — misery and sorrow. When we meet Goldfish again, we show them that they’re wrong, that the only thing waiting for anyone at the end of the line is death. That’s what we’re all destined for: dying.

Death lies at the core of Everhood’s story. We get to see how each character comes to terms with it, if it’s by feeling relief at the release it provides, or resignation toward its inevitability, or fear of the ending it brings. Some are more combative, saying “not today” while trying to push it away just one more time (that scary sound you just heard was the increasingly insane patterns of light projectiles getting more insane).

That endless corridor has a thematic reason to exist, then, it’s not just trolling for trolling’s sake. Because let’s imagine the first madlad that went for it, the one who took the fall for everyone that came later, and just watched their YouTube video showing what happens. Let’s imagine how they must have felt during this daunting task, to be stuck in this incredibly boring action of holding the analog stick to the right for hours, only occasionally moving in other directions to avoid rocks, all the while hoping the next few minutes will finally grant them the sweet release of an ending. But the corridor just keeps going. And they begin to feel that there’s something wrong, that they shouldn’t be doing that, forever persevering; doubt creeps in, and they start to question their path, they doubt that it’s supposed to be like that. They want to give up, and they almost do it many times. At the beginning, we all had to embrace immortality in Everhood, and that’s probably how living forever must feel: when the madlad finally arrived at their destination, when the corridor finally ended, they probably felt exactly like most characters in Everhood, embrace that ending — whatever it is, not caring for what it is — just because it means that they can finally be free of a mindless existence. They can finally rest.

However, it’s true that it would have been better if we had spent just a couple more hours with these characters to get to know them better. So that we could understand why every single one copes with death the particular way they do. Everhood’s pacing in its first half, as you can deduce, ingenious as you are, is brisk to match the overall madness, but its second half needed a different approach. It needed us to have sat down with these characters for a good while, spent time with them, for everything that happens later to truly hit home.

Nevertheless, Everhood: An Ineffable Tale of the Inexpressible Divine Moments of Truth (I’m truly sorry) is more than a great companion piece to Undertale, offering a quirky story that isn’t afraid to go places and a bonkers combat system that stands on its own feet and gives the whole experience personality: Everhood is not “we have Undertale at home”; Everhood is ingenious in its own way.

September 21, 2025.