![]() ![]() ![]() The best area of the game by far is ‘The Sacred Grove’, as it features Time Crystals which, when struck, change the game from 3D to 2D or vice versa, and several puzzles in the area are based around switching back and forth, as you can only walk over certain tiles in three dimensions, but tiny shrubs you could walk over in two dimensions grow into small, path-blocking trees in three. Also, lifted wholly from another video game. Much like Evoland itself, it’s interesting, easy to pick up and very fun, but not particularly deep or challenging, and unlikely to keep you entertained for very long. Every card has a numeric value on its top, left, right and bottom, and players take turns placing them in a 3×3 grid, and if two cards are placed next to each other in any way, the values where they connect are compared, with the highest winning, which turns the opposing card the color of the winning player. Outside of the upgrades to the game that you can find, the world is littered with treasure chests that usually contain one of two things bonus stars, of which there are 30 to collect, and 23 cards from the game within a game, ‘Double Twin’, which is functionally identical to ‘Triple Triad’ from Final Fantasy VIII. Also, there’s an ‘Arrow to the Knee’ joke, which would automatically give this game a score of negative four out of ten, if it didn’t have the excuse of coming out in 2013. Subtlety is not one of the game’s strong points, and there are moments – a boss fight against ‘Kefka’s Ghost’, picking up a ‘Legendary Sword’ that looks exactly like the Buster Sword from Final Fantasy VII with the description “Does it remind you some (sic) past hero” – that can come across as a bit cheap. The main character, ‘Clink’ – it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize this was a mixture of Cloud and Link – wakes up in some nondescript woods and soon finds another party-member named ‘Kaeris’, a healer and spellcaster, and decides to help her save her village from the clutches of a dark nemesis, who, to the surprise of no-one, is named ‘Zephyros’. The actual story of Evoland is basic but fairly enjoyable. Almost everything you unlock is a mirror to a real-world advancement in the video game industry, and it’s nice to watch the world around you transform from The Legend of Zelda on NES to an early PlayStation 2 RPG. Shortly after this, they unlock a sword and monsters, an 8-bit and later 16-bit color palette, and as the game continues, you unlock more world features like save points, an overworld, random battles and more fantastic abilities, like… being able to move diagonally. Because of this, Evoland suffers somewhat from not really having an identity of its own behind all of the references, although to some extent, the references are the entire point of the game.Įvoland opens with a character in a monochrome, Gameboy-like setting who is unable to do anything but move right, where they find a treasure chest that unlocks the astonishing ability to move left, where they can find another chest that unlocks free movement. Shiro Games mainly cite Zelda, Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest and Diablo for their inspiration, but there are nods to Mario and The Elder Scrolls along the way. The idea behind Evoland was uniquely simple an action-RPG that evolved around the player, showing, in three to four hours, the journey from the video games of the late 80s up to the early 2000s. The original entry to Ludum Dare 24 became known as Evoland Classic and is still available for free online. At the 24 th Ludum Dare Jam in August 2012, where participants are given a theme and have 48 hours to design a video game based around it, the topic was ‘Evolution’, and out of more than 1,400 entries, the winner was a game called Evoland by French developer Nicolas Cannasse, who would later team up with Sebastien Vidal to form Shiro Games and release Evoland as a fully-fledged game. Ludum Dare, a video game programming contest that began on an internet forum of the same name in 2002, is responsible for some of the biggest titles in indie gaming, including Broforce, Pony Island and Gods Will Be Watching. Like so many great indie games, Evoland began life as a Game Jam project. ![]()
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