Evoland

Evoland has a pretty interesting concept: you start in a world made of a couple of pixels and no sound, and as you progress, you start unlocking features you take for granted in modern games: color graphics, music, better animations, larger maps, turn-based battles, real-time combat, and much more. You go through the whole history of gaming in a couple of hours. It gradually introduces new mechanics, graphics styles, and gameplay modes. It's not a very deep RPG; it mostly thrives on nostalgia. The actual combat and gameplay are fairly simple; it is not very challenging; it feels more like a tribute to classics like The Legend of Zelda and Final Fantasy than a fully fleshed-out product, and it's full of nods and jokes centered around old-school games. It's a fun little RPG, and you can beat it in around 5 hours, so I'd say buy it on sale.

Interesting concept with poor execution. What starts out as an exploration of the history of the medium is quickly bogged down with humor that falls flat more often than not. For example, everyone is familiar with annoying fetch quests that force you to backtrack multiple times. Making the player participate in one doesn't make it funny, it just wastes our time. I wanted to enjoy this, but it is a slog.

I was really looking forward to playing Evoland since its launch, but I ended up having to request a refund. The advertised controller support is completely broken. I tested the game with two different official Xbox controllers that work perfectly fine with all my other Steam games, and it either fails to detect them entirely or the input is completely messed up. I even plugged in a Logitech G923 wheel just to see if the game would recognize any input device at all, but nothing worked. I spent a lot of time following guides and troubleshooting steps from online forums, but I couldn't get it fixed. It is a real shame because I wanted to experience it myself, but at this point, I am just going to get my money back and stick to watching playthroughs online. I cannot recommend this if you plan to play with a gamepad.

Hitbox detection poor for endgame.

An ambitious run through the various styles of RPG in a single coherent story. While the execution doesn't always do justice to the various styles, the overall experience is well worth the time.

The game mirrors the technological evolution of the medium, starting with the heavy visual and mechanical abstraction of the 8-bit era, where symbols and simple sprites represented complex worlds due to hardware limitations, and gradually unlocking more detail.