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 fusing with the intensely beautiful yet deeply unsettling soundtrack to coalesce 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 over the event hori…

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

This is an incredibly important game and one which I wish the broader game design industry would study. It's an excellent argument for "Games as Art". It deconstructs a lot of baseline assumptions about structure, level design, progression, player freedom, etc. Although the game's visual style may be off-putting to a newcomer, it is impressively legible. No matter how crazy and psychedelic the visuals get, it's always clear where the player is oriented in space and what is happening around them. This is an insane triumph of game design, I cannot even imagine how the developer successfully "whiteboarded" this game. How do you go from having some of these ideas in your head to implementing them in this way? Cruelty Squad definitely opened the door for games like this one, but Extreme Evolution does significantly more with some of Cruelty Squad's norm-challenging ideas. I am not being hyperbolic when I say I think this is one of the most important games of all time. It's hard to classify genre-wise -- I guess it's a Psychedelic Buddhist Metroidvania ImmSim Breath-of-the-Wild-Progression Abstract Platformer? However you'd classify it, it is a mindblowing game and worth playing to 100%…

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