Overall Rating: 60%Summary: Evan's Remains provides a mixed experience, prioritizing its engaging story over its puzzle platforming elements. The platforming sections offer simple yet enjoyable gameplay, enhanced by attractive visuals and suitable music. However, the plot starts off strong but gradually becomes complex, leading to a confusing and unsatisfying ending. Despite these drawbacks, the game deserves a cautious recommendation, especially given its affordable price point.
💚 Pros: 💚Charming pixel art graphics
Unique blend of genres
Smooth controls during platforming sections
🔻 Cons: 🔻Superficial mixture of different genres, lacking gameplay depth
Overloaded story with poor pacing
Unsatisfying ending
Achievements:⏲️ Time for 100%: 3 – 4 hrs
🏋️ Estimated Difficulty: 2/10
🔍 Missable: 4
🎮 Multiplayer: None
🦗 Glitched/Bugged: None
🚫 Unobtainable: None
Notes: The game is generally easy, and most of the achievements can be unlocked intuitively. There are only four missable achievements, two of which are particularly challenging and require some prior knowledge. The "Boquita papá!" achievement involves playing a specific part of the game in Spanish, while the "Aurelio" achievement requires backtracking after a specific scene. Missing these achievements is not a major issue since the game is relatively short, but it can be frustrating regardless.
Detailed Review:Evan's Remains is a tricky game to review. While it's marketed as a mix of puzzle platformer and graphic adventure, it leans more towards the latter.
The game's main focus is on the story and how it's presented. Although there are over 30 logic-based platform puzzles, you only get to solve a couple of them before the next part of the story unfolds.
The issue is that I actually find the platforming parts more enjoyable than the overall story. Evan's Remains has lovely pixel graphics, smooth animations, and easy-to-use controls, especially during the puzzle sections. The puzzles themselves aren't too difficult. You jump from platform to platform, making them disappear. Later on, you encounter switches, platforms that boost your character's momentum, and teleporters. The goal remains the same throughout the game: use the platforms to climb and reach the top of a wall that blocks your path. It's simple, basic, and fun. Most puzzles can be solved after a few tries, with a couple requiring more trial and error. Overall, the puzzle platforming part delivers what you'd expect from a good game in that genre.
On the other hand, the story of Evan's Remains, which ties everything together, is where the game disappoints me.
The story starts off decently. You play as Dysis, the character with the sunhat on the game's cover. Dysis is hired by a corporation to find Evan, a highly gifted person, on a remote tropical island. The island is where Evan was last seen, and he even sent a letter asking Dysis to come find him.
As you play, you control Dysis and explore the mysterious island. You discover strange monoliths scattered around, which serve as stages for the puzzles and are powered by ancient technology.
Eventually, Dysis meets Clover, another person exploring the island. Clover believes that the island holds the secret to immortality. He thinks the monoliths form a message, with each one representing a word. Conveniently, Clover has a notebook to decipher the message. He doesn't explain how he ended up on the island; he just vaguely mentions a boat journey and waking up on the shore. Dysis and Clover team up and continue exploring together.
So far, Evan's Remains is mostly enjoyable. The puzzles are simple yet engaging, and the story builds up with mysteries and questions. Will Dysis find Evan? Can Clover decipher the monoliths and uncover the truth about immortality?
The most frustrating part is how the story is told. As I mentioned earlier, you can only solve a few puzzles before the game interrupts with more of the story. Unfortunately, the storytelling relies heavily on flashbacks and lore dumps. It feels more like a visual novel than a puzzle platformer at times. There are many of these segments, suggesting that the focus during development was more on the story rather than the platforming elements.
The main problem with Evan's Remains, in my opinion, is that the story quality declines as you progress through the game. Especially after about two-thirds of the game, it takes a rapid downhill turn. I won't go into too much detail to avoid spoiling, so if you don't want spoilers, you should skip the next part where I discuss the story in more depth.
This is mainly because the story becomes overcrowded with too many elements, possibly more suitable for a longer game of 8 or 12 hours, rather than the shorter length of Evan's Remains. The game simply can't support such a multitude of plot twists.
While some of the twists add intrigue to the story, there is such a thing as too many plot twists, and Evan's Remains unfortunately exceeds that limit. The last part of the game is particularly guilty of this. Suddenly, a strange and creepy character is introduced, giving off a typical anime villain vibe. The game's tone noticeably shifts after this point.
In short, by the end of the game, it is revealed that almost everyone was deceived, and many things were not what they seemed. It turns out that most of the events were part of an elaborate scheme. Predictably, the strange character turns out to be the villain. The game concludes with Evan and the antagonist contemplating the question of whether the end justifies the means and if ethically questionable actions can be justified by seemingly altruistic motives.
The game attempts to present this as a deep, thought-provoking and original question, but in reality, many other pieces of media have explored this theme more effectively than Evan's Remains.
3.0