Everhood 2 Review — Psycho-Delic

Everhood 2 is something of a psychedelic nightmare; this unique take on the rhythm game genre is packed full of striking visuals, techno beats, and downright strangeness, leading me to believe that I must have been microdosed on something just before I launched the game. Everhood 2 is an incredibly creative title, displaying an outright defiance of conventional storytelling and gameplay that might put some players off but is sure to make the game a timeless favorite for others.

Everhood 2 is a story-driven RPG with rhythm game mechanics. Except, no, it isn’t; the game most certainly has a story, but beyond an overarching goal and a few recurring characters, I would struggle to tell you what exactly it’s about. What I can say is that you play as a lost soul who, with the help of a giant bird, seeks to defeat an evil dragon, hopping between multiple worlds as you do so.

Each of the game’s playable worlds is uniquely presented with phenomenal pixel art, weird and interesting characters, and has its own little subplots, enemies, and general laws of physics. You can go to a war-torn land of vegetable feudalism at one moment, only to find yourself in a city of neon lights, gambling allegories, and weirdly sexual homunculi in the next. What’s especially unique about Everhood 2 is that each of these incredibly strange worlds can be visited by the player in any order, with a few exceptions, such as the vegetable kingdom being the first one you can visit. You’re even given the opportunity to go to some areas you’re not meant to touch until much higher levels, granted you have the skill to defeat the challenges therein.

Said challenges are where the game’s biggest standout feature lies. Instead of turn-based combat or other traditional mechanics one can expect from an ARPG, Everhood 2 uses a unique battle system that is something between a rhythm game and a bullet hell title.

Enemies you face, from the most common of random encounters to the biggest of bosses, engage the player in a Guitar Hero-esque rhythm board where projectiles of various shapes and colors are launched at you in time with the beat. Colliding with these projectiles deals damage to your character, and while you do slowly heal over time during encounters, you’ll find yourself going down in 4-5 hits at level one, so the natural impulse is to dodge to the left or right or jump over them.

However, these projectiles are not just the boss’s way of killing you, but your main weapon against your enemy as well. Many forms of the beat-following projectiles can be absorbed instead of dodged, with the player being able to hold on to as many of one color of projectiles as they can grab before taking damage or absorbing a projectile of a new color. Once collected, you can then fire these right back at the enemy.

The more of a single color you collect, the better an attack you use against the boss; therefore, the combat in Everhood 2 entices you to collect as many notes as possible before taking damage or being forced to switch to another to save your own behind. Every enemy is weaker to a certain color of projectile; usually, the one that is rarest in their song, and the difference between collecting a few notes and a higher-level attack, especially one an enemy is weak to, is night and day. Many encounters can be cleared in one hit of your third-level ability, triggered by gathering enough of the same note.

Simple enough in theory, but in practice, it can be really tricky to pull off. At just medium-level difficulty, I often found myself overwhelmed by certain enemies, and all of my encounters took at least one retry. This is due in part to having to learn each enemy’s song and the pattern of the notes they throw at you, but also because the game doesn’t do an incredible job of teaching you the nature of each type of attack as it comes after you.

There are objects in the game that will always do damage to me at some point during a fight, because the interactions seem inconsistent; I can’t tell if I’m meant to dodge or absorb these projectiles, because I’ve had success and failure with both approaches.

You can also expect the game to get gradually more difficult as you progress, but leveling up is a flat increase in health and damage, so it’s not unfair. Side note, but I believe there is a feature in the early game that can actually allow you to level up infinitely before moving on, if you don’t mind rummaging through piles of tomato seeds and eating them for upwards of an hour.

A minor nitpick I have about Everhood 2 is that the songs in each encounter feel a bit short. That may sound like I’m asking for too much for a game where every single enemy has its own unique song, but I found that the tracks simply felt as if they started to loop too soon. While this is helpful for learning enemy attack patterns, I felt like I really noticed the looping, which isn’t something you would do if it was a satisfying length of song before repeating.

Try Hard Guides was provided a PC review copy for Everhood 2. Find more detailed looks at popular and upcoming titles on our Game Reviews page! Everhood 2 is available on Steam and Nintendo Switch.