Over the ten years of its existence, the small studio Pathea has managed to try itself in different genres, including a farmer’s simulator, RPG and even multiplayer action. Her new project Ever Forward takes players by the hand into the space of post-apocalyptic stories and simple puzzles.
Ever Forward takes place in a mysterious world where a girl in a white dress named Maya travels through the fields of forgotten memories, solving seemingly simple tasks. Each page of her life, covered with fire and ashes, is an unsolved puzzle, after solving which you will learn another fragment of the background story of the relationship between daughter and mother in the ruins of dead space.
The tasks themselves look simple – you need to carry the cube from one point of the level to another, avoiding security systems and using moving platforms and teleports. And although in most cases it quickly becomes clear how to solve a particular problem, problems arise with nuances. For example, Maya runs great outside of protective systems, but as soon as she gets close to the security bot, she bends down and goes to a slow step. Robots react to sound, so even jumping in place can lead to the death of the heroine and restart from the checkpoint. Well, in many situations, you need not only to jump to attract attention on the spot and teleport, but also roll a die and distract the bot, which has a limited field of vision, and then return to the desired point and activate the teleport. However, due to the large area where the girl sneaks, you may not be in time for a few seconds. You have to shift the angle of the throw, try to run away earlier and hope for success.
At the final stages of the game, a new mechanic is added to everything else: the world begins to rotate according to the sound of the gong, and you need to manage to roll the dice or press the panel a few seconds before this happens. Fortunately, given that the passage of each stage consists of many small pieces, where you must do the correct and honed actions, the authors allow you to save progress anywhere in the level. And this really saves you from a lot of annoyance and frustration.
Graphically, Ever Forward looks fantastic. The animation of the main character is great, there are very beautiful lighting effects. At the same time, the environment is made in a minimalistic style and does not distract from the main task. In places it seems like a very organic blend of Control and ICO .
It’s worth noting that shortly before the release of the base game, Pathea released an Ever Forward demo called Prologue . It includes the first few levels from the full build and much more complex puzzles. But the final version is not much longer than the demo. After the demo, you can go through Ever Forward from start to finish, knowing what to do, in an hour. If you play for the first time, then everything will take, given the problems with accuracy and time, 2-3 hours.
Ever Forward is a very beautiful and exciting game with a warm and touching story about the relationship between mother and daughter. It suffers from not always responsive controls, overly sensitive to the accuracy of time puzzles and an interfering element of randomness. Well, from the full product I would like much more than a couple of hours of game time.
