“Eversion” is Wonderfully Twisted

Simplicity is a virtue but sim­plic­ity that is both fun and twisted at the same time, is good enter­tain­ment. Take the basic “Super Mario Bros” con­cept of jump­ing from plat­form to plat­form, killing ene­mies by drop­ping your­self on their heads and col­lect­ing gems that can be obtained from bricks you hit with your body, add a truly dis­turb­ing theme of a real­ity torn between mul­ti­ple lay­ers and what you get is “Eversion”, a short but bril­liant indie plat­former you are going to fall in love with.

You play as Zee-Tee, a funny look­ing guy that resem­bles a flower, which in itself is so sweet it has made me feel sick. At the begin­ning of the first stage (or “world”) the sky is blue, flow­ers are col­or­ful and ene­mies look more like they should be hugged, not killed. Everything is cheer­ful. You start walk­ing around and jump­ing, col­lect­ing gems and enjoy­ing this plat­form­ing utopia but then the game presents you with an option to switch into the next, adja­cent plane of real­ity. Suddenly you real­ize there is much more going on here than it seemed before. After a while, things become com­pli­cated as each world allows the player to delve deeper and dis­cover lay­ers that are more and more dis­turb­ing and horror-like.

Each layer has its own mechan­ics. Jumping and run­ning is always the same but apart from that there are many dif­fer­ences. Where one layer has trans­par­ent clouds, a sec­ond one may allow you to walk on them and another one will not have clouds at all. Sometimes you can destroy par­tic­u­lar bricks or obtain gems by hit­ting them but some­times they are com­pletely imper­vi­ous to your attacks. Trees may block your way in some lay­ers but there may be no tress at all in others.

These small but sub­stan­tial mod­i­fi­ca­tions make each world much larger and com­pli­cated as you have to nav­i­gate back and forth between vari­ants of the same level not only to get to the end but, more impor­tantly, to col­lect all gems or dis­cover secrets, which of itself brings con­se­quences I am not going to men­tion to avoid spoil­ers. Even bet­ter, you are not free to phase in and out from a layer when­ever you like. You need to find spe­cial spots where you are allowed to do so and these are scat­tered all over the place, depend­ing on which layer you want to access. As you advance through stages, the expe­ri­ence becomes demand­ing both intel­lec­tu­ally and in terms of the level of agility it takes to exe­cute more dif­fi­cult com­bi­na­tions of jumps.

There is no appar­ent nar­ra­tive or plot here besides the goal of sav­ing (?) the princess who is not even men­tioned before you meet her. However, a story of sorts is being told, at least indi­rectly. All the game does is depict­ing var­i­ous lay­ers of real­ity that can be exter­nal or inter­nal (men­tal) to the pro­tag­o­nist. Everything that is going on can be under­stood metaphor­i­cally and it is up to the player to actu­ally think of what she has just seen and to build the story on her own. What it becomes exactly, depends solely on player’s imag­i­na­tion which only adds value to the game.

Overall, “Eversion” is short but quite chal­leng­ing, espe­cially if you want to see both end­ings. There is almost no penalty to dying, apart from mon­sters get­ting respawned and crushed walls becom­ing intact again. You can revisit each world at will to col­lect remain­ing gems and if you quit the game, it will remem­ber all that you have achieved up to this point. This means you have unlim­ited num­ber of tries and the only thing that can stop you from pro­gress­ing is lack of persistence.

You can down­load “Eversion” for free as a Flash game or via Steam. The later ver­sion is the one I have played and obtained screen­shots from. It has some­what enhanced graph­ics, allows you to col­lect Steam achieve­ments and you can sup­port devel­op­ers by buy­ing it. Let’s be hon­est – pay­ing 3,99€ for this amount of pure old-school fun with added com­plex­ity is a no-brainer.

Get it now!