Ever Forward (PS5)
When designing a puzzle for a video game, stripping away extraneous elements or limiting options is a common way to push players towards a solution. However, if you want to encourage them to be more creative and think outside the box, you often instead provide them with plenty of tools or abilities so more variables can be in play and encourage an imaginative approach. Ever Forward is a bit of a strange puzzle game though for making the player think outside the box by heavily limiting the amount of variables in any puzzle, but because your options are so restricted, you have to start thinking of every possible little variation that still exists to come to the right solutions.
Ever Forward tells the story of Maya, a young girl who wakes up on a picturesque island only for her vision to flicker and show that idyllic space is not real. It’s not long until she encounters more obvious indicators she’s in an artificial space. Fragments of ruined houses with floating furniture will transport her to an even less realistic area, the puzzle solving taking place in a void populated mostly by large white shapes and an ominous looking tree that mirrors the nicer looking one found on the island. Solving the puzzles opens up more of the island for exploration, but also all of them come with a glimpse at Maya’s past as represented by heavily simplified spaces where human beings are represented by silhouettes made of sparkling lights. Maya, despite her young age, was a bit of a savant, and with her mother trying to figure out ways to help with an unclear issue that keeps her away from Maya, the rather smart girl tries to think of her own ways to assist. Maya certainly has technological smarts but not quite the wisdom of the way the world works, the player uncovering more of a tragic story while also coming to realize the little cube-shaped robot that transforms and helps you in exploring both spaces has a bit of history with her as well. The story scenes provide not only a nice quick reward for each puzzle cleared, but they add an emotional touch to the game and one that’s easy enough to get invested in even though few scenes last very long.
Unfortunately, while Ever Forward can be a lovely looking game that tries to tell a touching story, sometimes the graphics get in the game’s way thanks to the prevalence of unintentional glitches. While none seemed to hinder the actual gameplay, there were times where it did threaten to rob moments of their emotional weight. For some reason near the game’s climax, I experienced an issue where Maya’s lower jaw completely disappeared and her eyes turned black and white, making her look more like something out of a horror movie. It thankfully did not appear in the scenes themselves, but the gameplay segments around it had a horrifying looking heroine during the moments we’re supposed to feel a very different emotion. Other visual issues occurred on the island like when I loaded in and found the nearby area polluted with so many random giant green triangles it was hard to see anything but the glitch, but even smaller moments like noticing the surfaces of little houses change based on how you position your camera were clearly unintentional bugs rather than some deliberate flaw in the false spaces you find yourself in.
If anything, the glitchiness of other visuals might make the game’s emphasis on lean but complex puzzles wiser so there were less potential failure points. For the puzzles of Ever Forward, all you need to do is get a small cube to a red beam of light at the other side of wherever you find yourself. However, your path to that light is often watched by Roundy-bots, little spherical machines that float in place with a blue cone of vision who will zap you and send you back to a checkpoint the moment they see you. Roundy-bots are sensitive to noise as well, meaning walking near one causes Maya to automatically tiptoe, preventing you from pulling off any unimaginative stealth trickery once the game has taught you the basics of distractions. Instead, you’ll need to start considering what few things you do have on offer. The cube can be thrown, Maya can do a little hop that makes a bit of noise, and those are essentially the only universal tools you have. Some puzzles will introduce elements like switches you can activate with the block, necessitating leaving behind the very object you need to succeed, while others might have more than one block in the mix or some means of quickly teleporting to another part of the puzzle.
Ever Forward’s puzzle design means it can create a puzzle as simple as two Roundy-bots looking at each other across the space you need to walk and turn it into a brain-bending conundrum. You know the basic tools you have at your disposal as you approach it, but with Roundy-bots being so quick to zap you if they spot even a bit of you, it’s not going to be easy to get around them, especially since when they are on alert, they look around more and with a wider vision cone. The vision cone could do with being more clear, the player inevitably going to have to inch to the very edge of it when testing solutions and some clearly marked edges would avoid the frustration of dying when you thought you were safe, but Ever Forward does have a smart little touch. The checkpoint you are reverted back to when you do fail can be set by you and it perfectly preserves the state of the current puzzle. It remembers where you are, where the blocks are, and any other small details like how moving platforms might be positioned or the activation state of a switch. You only get one checkpoint at a time but you can break down a puzzle into smaller chunks to solve it, and allows you to more quickly experiment with elements like how a Roundy-bot might turn to investigate a sound.
Later puzzles can get a bit more advanced like incorporating shifting gravity, but the difficulty and satisfaction that still comes from most of them is the game’s paring down each puzzle to the basics. Your little hop ends up being a surprisingly flexible means of influencing puzzles, the player essentially asked to think of the many different ways a basic action can be twisted to provide a different outcome. Ever Forward does have a hint system involving leaves you collect for doing optional interactions around the island, but because the designs are often so simple to see the totality of and yet require creative thought to overcome, it almost feels like getting a tip is circumventing the game’s emphasis on trying not to pigeon-hole an action as having only one purpose. While some solutions are about a clearer order of operations that still requires some smarts to figure out how to pull off the actions, often realizing what the possible interactions are is a hump to get over albeit a sometimes frustrating one to overcome thanks to how slow you walk and how attentive the robots are.
THE VERDICT: While seeing its otherwise pleasant graphics fall apart around you can pull you out of the decent emotional tale of Ever Forward, the puzzles have been honed to a fine point that makes them gratifying to solve. Even a simple looking puzzle will make you rack your brain as you try to figure out what a few simple actions can do to overcome an obstacle that doesn’t have an immediately clear solution, and while there are fewer than 20 true puzzles in the game, the time you spend trying to figure out every little edge your basic actions can give you make for an interesting learning process where imaginative puzzles thrive. Some stiffer parts like movement and the unfortunate ambiguity of the robot’s vision at points do make the learning process a bit weaker, but the very helpful self-guided checkpoint system also helps you inch ever closer to figuring out a way to clear the deceptively basic puzzle designs.
And so, I give Ever Forward for PlayStation 5…
An OKAY rating. The plot of Ever Forward may not hit as hard as it wants to despite investing you enough and the rather nice visuals are let down by the moments they practically collapse in on themselves, but Ever Forward’s ability to construct solid puzzles out of so little really makes it worth a look even for their design alone. Yang Bin and Zhu Qiqi, the game’s level designers, did some impeccable work honing puzzles down into such simple shapes and yet have them feature solutions that require a good degree of thought to overcome. Discovering you are not as limited as you might feel with your basic options leads to plenty of lightbulb moments while having such restrictive designs in play also means you often have to toy around with your options to get a feel for what can even be done. It’s a learning process and one that doesn’t overstay its welcome even when you reach the hardest trials because there are only so many things you can do, the solution tantalizingly close and just requiring you to realize the full extent of what’s in play. Some parts of the basic game experience do keep it from being a clean process, in a game that pared down so much else it’s a bit surprising Roundy-bot vision wasn’t made absolutely clear to help you make decisions better, and tiptoeing when near a robot is an often annoying element even though it might exist to prevent players from concocting very plain ways to slip past. The island is unfortunately underutilized, having a few very basic interactions that may look nice but are over quickly and don’t really fill the space of a mostly empty exploration hub, but at least Ever Forward also had the sense to include one of the most generous checkpoint systems possible to make sure that you can solve puzzles bit by bit instead of having to repeat what you’ve already overcome.
Ever Forward’s level designers should bring their knack for puzzle creation to a cleaner experience than this one. The story tries but can’t quite land every beat it lays out and the rest of the game feels like it wasn’t put together with the same degree of care, but it also thankfully won’t impede your enjoyment of the deceptively simple block deliveries. The thrill of solving puzzles that ask you to think more closely about what you’re doing than just the surface is what makes Ever Forward work despite some apparent flaws, but figuring out how to sneak around a single watched corner is a more mechanical sort of satisfaction than what one might get from playing with more advanced or unusual systems. Ever Forward doesn’t forever stay rooted in the basics, but its design sensibilities do often make every inch of a space a meaningful part of the problems you’ll need to think deeply to overcome.