Extreme Evolution: Drive to Divinity

I acknowledge that this is not a game for everyone, but aside from having one of the hardest names of any game I've ever heard of, [i]Extreme Evolution: Drive to Divinity[/i] has instilled in me a fundamental shift in my psychology and I now doubt I'll ever look at any other collect-a-thon platformer or self-proclaimed "surrealist" game quite the same way again. The presentation is spiritually provocative, its overwhelming maximalism and often garish visuals collide with the omniscient, beautiful yet deeply unsettling soundtrack, their juncture coalescing with your possibly chronological but certainly never linear explorations of the cosmically extrinsic 'sites' within. Swapping between your constantly growing collection of 'forms' as you navigate these ethereal environments, chaining each one's unique movements and characteristics together strength-by-strength to make your way through this kaliedoscopic interpretation of some metaphysical plane where any line between the scientific and the divine has long since washed away under the waves of an unknowable imperceptible energy, it feels like performing a well-rehearsed dance across the four-hundredth dimension or skipping a stone o…

my eyes hurt and my dream last night was full of the weirdest psychadelic visuals and broken graphics ive ever had 14.59483/10 would recommend to both friends and enemies

driven to divinity

Egg

So, uh, there's a few things to unravel here: EXTREME EVOLUTION looks great just as much as it's headache inducing. It's a work of art (sorta), it's an attempt at making a somewhat bare-bones marble game into something more meaningful. The design (an absolute mish-mash of colors constantly visually warping inside solid forms) is making the game extremely confusing. There is an option to modify the visuals and make it all much clearer, and that's when you start to feel that you're just exploring somebody's game engine "gyms", basically, attempts at making stuff work with the objects they've created and given physics for the players to control. It's all very basic experiments. It feels like we're learning about his game at the same time as he is. It's as close as to "stream of consciousness game creating" could get. So the question is, if I remove all the cool-but-headache-inducing visuals, is the game any good? Is there any fun or even rewarding feeling to be had here? Sorta, yeah, but also, not really. It's a somewhat bare-bones marble game. It's got a few things in there to mix things up, different shapes/objects that work differently. Make the objects go places. Collect things …

Super Monkey Ball was this guy's Velvet Underground