Everhood is a mixed bag for me. On one hand you have some pretty unique and fun combat gameplay that remains fun throughout the game's entire runtime, and never really gets stale despite the game's large amount of fights.
To combat plays like a hybrid between a rhythm game and a bullet hell game, meaning you have plenty of attacks to dodge that follow the rhythm of the music. It starts out simple at first, but the game throws in more variations to the combat as time goes on, keeping things fresh and interesting.
Outside of the combat the game is mainly just a walking simulator, as you walk through relatively empty and visually bland environments, basically just going from one combat encounter to another, while sometimes doing some very simple puzzles or minigames.
The music can be hit or miss. There are some pretty good tracks that found themselves in my playlist after my first playthrough, but most tracks of the ost just didn't do it for me. But that is entirely subjective, and i am sure that other people will enjoy tracks that i didn't like, and vice versa.
Now, here is the game's biggest weak point: The Story.
Everhood feels like it tries incredibly hard to be Undertale 2, without knowing what made Undertale so special. The characters are not as interesting, yet the game really tries to make you care about all thirty-ish of them, even if the more prominent ones only get a screentime of around three to four minutes. The cast of characters is incredibly big, but just as shallow. None of them have any real depth to them or something that makes them truly interesting.
The writing also adds to this. The game feels like it tries to emulate Undertale with its writing style, and i am convinced that the developers thought that they achieved exactly that. The game feels it's as funny and clever as Undertale, but it just comes off as pretentious. It insists upon itself.
Then there's the ending, and the ending is legit horrible. No major spoilers, but the game has you go through several fake outs, making its cast of mediocre melodies say goodbye to you over and over again, just to say "But wait! We haven't thanked you enough for this wonderful, beautiful and amazing journey that you just went through" and it just keeps going. The game's writing is not nearly strong enough to justify an ending like this, and the only thing i felt during it was annoyance.
However, if you can look past the story and writing issues, then you have a genuinely fun boss rush rhythm game on your hands here. However, the writing is unfortunately very hard to look past.
7/10
