Evan’s Remains is a beautiful pixel-art experience that sets the bar too high but fails to reach it.
At first glance, Evan’s Remains seems like just another pixel-art game with an average story and average gameplay: Like something that you can play in a few hours and never think about ever again. But it is not. It aims to be something more significant than that, to tell a story more extraordinary than that- But this is precisely why it dooms itself at times.
Evan’s Remains is a puzzle platformer with science-fiction visual novel elements. Think of Portal, but make it a lot prettier and more effortless. Also, add some pixel art. The picture is very close to what Evan’s Remains is actually like.
In this game, we follow a character named Dysis, who is tasked to find Evan upon receiving a threatening letter sent to the company that she works for. Evan’s Remains is a reasonably short game; it only lasts about 3 hours. Half of this 3-hour playtime is the story told mainly through dialogue, and the other half is the puzzles that the player solves to make progress in the game.
The puzzles that constitute the actual gameplay are not too easy or too hard. They have balanced well, actually, especially with the story in mind. This will be further explained in this review, so don’t worry. There are no actual tactics to solve the puzzles either. You can’t find any indications as to where you should go while solving something.
Pure intuition guides the player, and this try-and-fail technique makes it so much fun to play. There aren’t any rules or instructions that would make you feel dumb if you fail to understand them. This results in the player solving a puzzle without giving it much thought or accidentally solving it. Thus, we could say that the puzzles of this game are not challenging or ambitious. Yet, for a game like this, this is entirely understandable.
That was one part of it. The gameplay is fun, yes, but what about the other half? What about the story? The puzzle-platforming aspect of Evan’s Remains may not be as ambitious, but its story element does pretty much just that. Unfortunately, it is ambitious that the payoff fails to meet the expectations.
The story’s ending leaves so many questions unanswered and many conflicts unsolved. It’s not like the story ends up being open to interpretation either; a few things are just plainly unanswered. It almost feels like the writers forgot to close some of the previously opened doors. Of course, this can be frustrating if you’re engaged in the story. But to not spoil anything, let’s say that the ending is not as good as the journey leading up to it. Let’s leave it at that.
And yet, it wouldn’t be fair to bash the story just because of the ending. Let’s talk about the most significant chunk of the game: The dialogues. Evan’s Remains chooses to tell the story through dialogues in a proper visual novel fashion, and the dialogues are a lot more fun than you’d expect for this game.
There have been so many times when the dialogues felt clever and witty- They are not the type of dialogues you would want to skip quickly. Characters have their personalities that shine through their actions and their words.
Dysis, for instance, is a great main character. She is intelligent, witty in conversation, and a genuinely good person who makes the players root for her. Playing with a soulless main character can ruin the whole game, but Evan’s Remains is good at making sure you feel engaged in the story with its characters. We always appreciate good characterization, so props to Evan’s Remains there.
The game also flows beautifully. Yes, it is three hours long, but it does not feel like it. It feels a lot shorter. A big chunk of this beauty comes from the actual graphics because the art is honestly breathtaking. I know there were times when I stopped playing to take screenshots. And they do not fade out as the game goes on; they get better and better. Graphics-wise, Evan’s Remains is a pixel art masterpiece.
Another reason the game flows is the excellence of the mystery it establishes in its heart. The storytelling calls attention to itself—it is so good at keeping the player engaged as it unravels from start to finish.
This is precisely why the puzzles are not hard to help: Although many people love to challenge themselves by playing pretty punishing puzzle games, Evan’s Remains tells a story that needs to be listened to and thought over to be understood.
Yes, it is a puzzle platformer, but it is also a visual novel, and continuously interrupting the novel with challenging solve puzzles would be nothing short of annoying. Therefore, it would only be fair to say that Evan’s Remains achieves a balance that many other games cannot.
The skillfully drawn graphics, combined with the engaging (and at times thrilling) story and fun-to-solve puzzles, make the game an experience everyone should play at least once. Though the ending leaves the player unsatisfied, it is the journey that matters.
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