The first Evoland was mostly just a one-joke game that was funny for half an hour. Not so it’s successor, Evoland 2. That one is a full game in it’s own right telling an overarching story and integrating it’s greatest selling point, the constant change of gameplay mechanics, into that story.

You mostly play in an Action Adventure way similar to Zelda, but there are different time eras, which all have a different graphical style: the past with it’s 8 bit and the present with 16 bit pixel art, as well as the future which has 3D graphics. You jump back and forth between the times to follow the plot and find out why you can do that in the first place. At certain points of the mostly linear game story you have scenes with special game play mechanics. From fighting game or Bejeweled to Prof.Layton puzzles, there is a lot of variety. And while no mechanic is really deep, it’s only there for at max. 30 minutes, so nothing overstays it’s welcome in my eyes.

The story is nothing overly philosophical, but it worked for me to endear the characters (well, except the MC, because its literally a blank state, maybe as reference to those older games, maybe because they didn’t knew what to do with him) to me and move the game forward. Sadly it did get tangled up a bit in it’s own time shenanigans story, but nearly every story with time travel does, so I’m not holding it against them. ::: spoiler spoiler for story Also it has an anomaly, which fucks up the timeline, so they put that excuse in for themselves, smart bastards =D :::

While it is not a must play, I felt well entertained during my play through and was fascinated about the world they created. ::: spoiler Spoiler main story end While I did complain above a bit about the time shenanigans, they did a pretty well constructed time loop in my opinion. When the antique past was introduced with the original Game Boy graphics, it nicely fit to the other time eras for me, since that was my first experiences with video games. So I highly enjoyed it’s inclusion. And also as said in the above spoiler: due to them closing the time loop from an originally linear time line, strange and contradicting things kind of fit and are explained due to this anomaly.

I also found the graphical effect inside the anomaly fascinating, the moving ground made me nearly motion sick through the monitor, which never happened before to me. It also is one of the few instances where they managed to portray other-worldliness convincingly inside a game. Too often it is just a different colour scheme or similar boring stuff.

And it is one of only a few games, where you don’t manage to break the loop in the end, as that is the goal in nearly every other time loop game. But that left a kinda bad taste in my mouth, I really wanted to help Ceres. =/ :::