Everhood 2 Review (Switch): Banging Musical Combat Distracts from a Purely Obscure Story

Jumping into a sequel to a game you’ve never played before sometimes can be a little daunting. For me, I usually like to experience a game’s story from the beginning. However, I jumped into Everhood 2 without having any prior knowledge of the original game. In fact, before the game’s recent announcement, I had never heard of the original. With that being said, I was quickly intrigued. The game’s trailer showed a Guitar Hero-like battle system that pulled me in, and I figured the very Undertale-looking world and story might drag me in. After playing the game, I come away pretty positive on the former, but overall, quite negative on the latter.

Rhythm fighting that relies on you being out of rhythm

Finding a unique combat system that is fun isn’t all that common in indie games. Sure, a bunch of games have ideas to differentiate themselves from what came before, but making them something the player wants to routinely come back to isn’t necessarily something that happens all of that often. Luckily, the combat found in Everhood 2 was both unique and fun to play with. It helps that there is quite a bit of very good music backing these battle portions.

When a battle starts, your character is placed at the bottom of the screen, with your adversary in front of them. As the music plays, colored symbols are thrown your way, which feels very like Guitar Hero, but that doesn’t mean this is a rhythm game. The enemy is built on attacking to the sounds of the music playing. Your inputs have no effect on the actual rhythm at all, so don’t go in thinking you have to be good at memorizing beats. If anything, the only advantage it gives you is memorizing the order in which attacks will be coming. As attacks come in, you either dodge them by moving left or right or jump over them. To attack, you absorb same-colored symbols until you build up enough power to send a strike over to the enemy.

One of the biggest hurdles I had to overcome in Everhood 2’s battles is not going for every symbol that came at me. Maybe it’s the part of my brain that played so much Guitar Hero back in the day, but I was often going out of my way to make sure nothing got past me without me absorbing it. However, if you absorb symbols that are different colors, you immediately forfeit everything that you had gathered up to that point and not fired off. So moments where a string of red and green symbols are sent to you, I had to learn to absorb the reds, and dodge the greens to make the fight not last forever. It’s a nice balance to play with, especially considering that some enemies will send you notes that are super effective to them. I never fully understood what made an attack super effective against an enemy, but when you land one, it plays a sound similar to what you hear in Pokémon when a super effective strike lands, which was quite nice to hear.

By far, the best part of this game is its boss battles. Every time you go up against a boss, something unexpected happens. Sometimes, the boss can mirror the battlefield. One might flip the screen. There were a lot of fun ideas thrown into the mix that made fights against significant enemies not only enjoyable for the rocking music, but exciting to see what new twist was going to be thrown into the mix this time.

Overall, the combat is quite fun, and there’s nothing else that I can think of that plays like it in battles. It’s not quite perfect, though. The most annoying aspect of battles I ran into was that every enemy in the game has one song that they battle to. Every time you encounter the same type of an enemy, you will be hearing that one song, which can happen quite a bit in sections. Luckily, the game is quite all over the place in terms of themes, so there is a pretty good variety of enemies, but the way the game is sectioned, you will see a lot of the same fights in short bursts. There is a RPG level up mechanic that is quite rudimentary here, and I think I would have just preferred sticking to the scripted boss battles instead of multiple of the same enemy chasing me down in the overworld.

My playthrough of Everhood 2 was carried out on easy difficulty, so I had quite a bit of leniency in battles. I felt that there were times that my symbol absorbing wasn’t really in-sync with my button presses, though. On Switch, you press ZR to absorb and ZL to fire. Most of the time it worked, but there were quite a few times I got hit by symbols I felt I properly absorbed. Using the triggers for your attacks just never fully resonated with me on a level that felt great.

I have no idea what this story is

If I had to guess, I would say I played somewhere between 8-10 hours of Everhood 2 and I don’t honestly think I can properly explain what this story is. You start with a questionnaire, which decides what color your character is. Supposedly, the color you are given has an effect on your game, but I don’t know what the difference is. I played with a green character. What I understand is that you and your group of friends made up of a raven, cat, rat, and toad take portals to different time periods and universes. Not long after starting, you have quite a bit of freedom to decide what route you want to go down, as there are quite a few portals you can follow the story through. There are moments where the game makes you make a decision, but I couldn’t honestly say if your choices had a profound impact on the game.

Everything about Everhood 2’s story and world feels random. I’ve never used drugs myself, but a lot of it is what I imagine a trip to be like. Pure chaos coming at you in every way. Every world has its own unique story with very different characters which is nice, but I couldn’t keep up with what was happening. There was just constantly obscure information being thrown at me and I couldn’t retain any of it. One moment, I’m helping a race of aliens escape slavery. The next time I visit, they have created a civilization and call me their leader. I move to a different portal and I’m fighting a horde of squirrels that seemed to take over a village and then I never see those people ever again. There were moments that I thought were funny, but most of the time it was just chaotic randomness that didn’t resonate with me.

One of my biggest complaints with the story is that it doesn’t know when to end. I went up against a final boss, which felt like a very fitting end to my time with the game, the credits rolled, and I walked out a door to see the story was still going for a few more hours. Then I got to what I thought would really be the final boss, and about three quarters of the way through that fight, a god-like creature came out of nowhere and ended that fight prematurely and rolled the credits again after saying something similar to, “Oops.” I got out of that credit scroll, just for another final boss fight that then threw me to before the final portion of the game started. That “final” final boss teased a weekly challenge system and an arena filled with fights in the game which seemed interesting, but I couldn’t find it anywhere, so I don’t know if that was real or not. Everything about the way this game handles its story and world was confusing to me.

Final verdict

Everhood 2 is an indie game that I can see a very niche group of people enjoying heavily. If there really is a weekly challenge system and arena for players to return to their favorite fights, I could see people eating that up. However, if you like a story that you can stick with and understand, you’re just going to give yourself a headache. It’s an indie game through and through, with plenty of spelling errors mixed into its code that some might find charming. The music for the most part was really good and I enjoyed the battling for what it was. Walking around these worlds being completely lost was not enjoyable to me. I would be interested to see how many ways this game branches off for players to have unique runs. I don’t think I have it in me to try another run through a campaign, but if it’s heavily tailored towards giving everyone a unique experience, that is definitely commendable.

Everhood 2 was reviewed on Nintendo Switch with a code provided by Foreign Gnomes. It is also available on Steam.

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