A Six Hour History Lesson

If you have an evening or two to kill and have a history of playing various Role Playing Games, you should probably give Evoland a shot. It’s a simple concept that started as a flash game that ended up being green lit for mass consumption of its target audience. You begin with the ability to walk to the right and build an entire adventure from there. Let’s fight through the ages.

In the beginning there was green scale. And only green scale. The lucky were able to walk in only the cardinal directions of up, down, left, and right. Inventions aren’t dreamt up by the gifted, they are found in treasure chests left by the programmer gods. The world changes upon opening these boxes. Sound came into being followed shortly by color.

In the first area you are fighting simple monsters in the old school Zelda style, and until you unlock the privilege of having heart containers don’t get hit or you’ll have to start over. It’s really not an issue because you unlock things so quickly you may not even be used to the last change. After you leave the forest you go to the world map and fight in SNES Final Fantasy style (complete with obnoxious encounter rate), and later unlock experience points. After the creation of forced dialog options and finding the companion character, you quickly run through a dungeon for each play style that’s been introduced so far.

This is where the game introduces the third dimension and turns into a love letter to Final Fantasy 7. Sometime when I run out of ideas I’ll post what I think of that game. The pre rendered backgrounds, airship, and main plot points mirror FF7. Final Fantasy worship aside, there are a couple of areas where you have to switch between 2D and 3D to solve puzzles. These puzzles are easily the best part of the game. Hitting crystals swaps between dimensions to let you bypass certain areas and change the environment to progress. 

Then there’s a tacked on Diablo dungeon thrown in there, it’s not terribly realized.

In the endgame you’re given an airship (that looks a lot like the Highwind) and the world is opened up. There are even a couple optional dungeons and side quests. If you like collecting things there are treasure chests littered throughout the game filled with stars that have no use and character cards used in the Double Twin (Triple Triad…get it?!) to artificially pad out the already short game time. When you’re ready to face the final boss it’s done like an action game, kind of a departure from the RPG theme throughout the rest of the game.

This is one of those indie titles that you have a good time for the duration, but afterwards you have the “Yep, that was a game.” feeling. I’d recommend people play it they have some extra time and maybe find the game at a discount. It would really be something to see some sort of epic told in this fashion to create a complete product instead of being just a novelty.