Ever Forward Review | (Nintendo Switch, PS4, Xbox, PC).

A world halfway between imagination and reality, built to cope with the memories of loved ones and a time where things were fine in the world. Ever Forward touches base on these themes, using cleverly designed puzzles to tell its story about a hindered mother and daughter's relationship during an unprecedented time.

Ever Forward doesn't explain itself chronologically, rather, you connect the dots looking backward. The story is told in bite-sized crumbs in the forms of cutscenes. These are the rewards for completing puzzles and in a sense are recollections of our protagonist's memories.

We play as Maya, a little girl stuck in a world formed of equal parts imagination and reality that has slowly been corrupted by the experiences in her life. As she enters these corrupted areas, she solves puzzles that recall the memories of her mother Ann, a woman working for a science facility with some questionable motives.

As I unraveled the puzzles, I unraveled the story, learning more about Ann's job and perhaps the reasoning behind her actions that may have been oblivious to a child-like Maya. Regardless, you see how those actions affected her as a kid and the repercussions of them now over the handful of hours this campaign took.

At its core, Ever Forward is a puzzle game with narrative elements and not the other way around. Puzzles are the meat and potatoes as they progress the story forward. The gameplay is split between exploring the more nature-centric world and the corrupted world.

You can think of the natural world as a hub world that leads you to the different puzzles available to you. The corrupt world on the other hand are the puzzles themselves, taking place in this simplistic monochrome world. Most of your time is spent in the puzzle world, traveling to segmented puzzles that take form once you activate them.

While easy and approachable at first, these puzzles quickly started to introduce new mechanics that kept gameplay feeling relatively fresh and challenging. For example, most of the early puzzles had me avoiding robots while moving a key block from the start to the end of the puzzle.

It was simple stealth gameplay. By the end of it though, I had unlocked teleporters that would be heavily time-based around robots and gravity shift sections that completely flipped the world. These new features felt clever in how they were used and I can tell the developers went through a lot of trial and error designing them.

However, for as much as I loved the way most of these puzzles were designed, I also found some puzzles that I knew the solution for but just felt like they designed poorly. This one, for example, has me sneaking around two robots using two blocks. Throwing the blocks causes noise that distracts the robots but this puzzle seemed like it didn't always want to listen to its solution.

Despite me doing what I believe was the solution, I kept getting detected and even got stuck in a game loop a few times using the manual save checkpoint system that works like a save state essentially. It wasn't until I finessed the puzzle by quickly running and walking periodically to move faster but not let the robots detect my noise that I was able to solve the puzzle.

There were so many instances like this where I felt there was one solution to the puzzle I knew, I correctly did it but not without fighting the game in the process. In these moments, even when I succeeded, I'd feel frustrated by the end of them. Ever Forward features a simplistic look that kind of mimics the look of something like the witness.

When in the nature setting, the visuals are lovely, saturated, and feel comforting in a sense. I feel like I could easily get lost in this world just wandering the valley and the grasslands in the distance. Sadly you don't really get that choice because this is just a hub world but a good one.

The puzzle world on the other hand feels like it comes from something like Control, a world that lost its color and is slowly falling apart. While both feel like to halves to a balanced world, I think its technical performance could still use some more balance.

In many instances, these worlds felt unfinished. The way I'd get teleported to the puzzle world well after I tried to go into it. The way that scenes sort of just jump cut to each other without much of a transition. And despite getting a message from the developers warning me that the intro animation was missing from my review build, including some of the music, they assured me it'd be ready for launch.

At the time of writing this review, the day before launch, it has yet to arrive during an update and something I want to note. Lastly, just as a record for any developers, if you're giving a review build to reviewers, don't slap a big watermark on your game, I know some people not respect the embargo rules but this sentence hovering over my screen feels exessive.

I disappointingly wasn't too impressed with Ever Forward's sound design. While I think it nails the atmospheric tones like the sounds of the beach and nature in the hub world, it lacks music and coordination with its dialogue. The music in the puzzle worlds for example, comes off more like ambient noise than music.

It's ominous in some ways but mostly white noise in others. My main problem with the sound design was the dialogue. This game is developed by a Chinese team and so when I was given the choice to play in English or Chinese dub, I chose the latter but with English subtitles.

For the most part, it worked and I think the actors for the Chinese dub did a great job at portraying their characters. However, I came across moments during gameplay where characters would speak but wouldn't have subtitles. Assuming these were pivotal moments to the narrative, it was a big slap in the face for a game trying to get me to care about its characters with every puzzle.

If puzzles were all it was trying to do, then Ever Forward succeeds in creating a handful of, both fun and head-scratching puzzles that can last you a few hours on a weekend. However, it lacks polish in just about every other field, from how its dialogue is handled, the visuals feeling like a rough cut, and the gameplay solutions not always feeling like an accurate solution.