EVERGARDEN Review for Steam

EVERGARDEN: A JOURNEY THROUGH THE FOREST WITH PUZZLES AND A MERGING CHALLENGE

With Flippfly’s latest installment, Evergarden, you find yourself on a thrilling journey in a mysterious forest full of intriguing puzzles, dark secrets, well-animated animals, and handy collectibles. On the first look, Evergarden might seem like a simple high score chaser but give it a few hours, and you will realize that there is much to discover and master inside this adventure. Evergarden includes an endless merging challenge where you combine different levels of flowers in your garden to improve your score, and various side missions which are the only way to proceed in the story and these include a variety of very challenging and entertaining puzzles.

Upon opening, the game presents you with a board that contains 19 hexagonal slots where you can either move your flowers or merge them to achieve flowers of higher levels. You can see the scoreboard to the top of the screen, and the big clock to the right of the screen represents the turns left. The controls and player mechanics are very convenient. The game mechanics, however, including the patterns asked by Fen, your inventory, and the bonuses you can get by performing specific actions may take some time to get used to.

Combining flowers in the specific patterns Fen expects gives you bonus flowers which you can plant directly to your garden. These come in handy in the later stages of the game. Another common strategy is to build monoliths by combining two big white flowers. Monoliths are jokers that can place any other type of flower in a patter. Once they are used inside a pattern, they light up, and now you can combine monoliths that are in any triangular formation to build super-monoliths. Super-monoliths will save you some space, give you bonus points, and plus, they look really cool and divine.

As you make more progress with side missions, and therefore as you go deeper in the jungle, you unveil things about the main character’s family and past mainly through letters, seek collectibles, and ultimately gain skills and abilities that help you further improve your score in the merging part of the game. These abilities, or power-ups, come as tunes recorded on plaques, and you can conveniently drag these to your inventory to use them in game.

There are 8 power-ups you can discover and use in the game: Timeless Rain, Aquila’s Call, The Whirlwind, The Abundance, Lightning Reel, The Sowing Song, Ava’s Jig, and Omnitune. All have significant benefits, but my favorites are The Abundance (makes one space on the board continually produce seeds), Lightning Reel (upgrades any group of plants of the same type), and Omnitune. (creates a wildcard that can serve as any plant in a pattern)

Although lack of written text and directions, which arguably gives the player a sense of freedom and adds in the mystery element of the game, there exists a gripping side story and a solid soundtrack in Evergarden. Moreover, as you follow your creature guide, Fen, through the woods and as you combine your flowers in any strategy you like, you are being presented with beautiful animations and well-designed graphics.  On the other hand, Evergarden may use some improvements as well. The narrative could have been expanded to add even more depth to the game. The lack of characters could have been covered with a detailed backstory on Fen, the creature guide that seems to have so much power and control in this mysterious jungle. Also, it would be more convenient if the game included a save option so that players can exit and come back at a later time without needing to start over. These, however, exist rather as minor issues than game changers.

Evergarden gives the player everything the relaxed-genre promises to give, and the competitive feature of the game makes it playable for long periods of time. There are endless strategies one can devise, and the colorful environment of the game combined with its gameplay ensures an incredible experience for the player.  In the jungles of Evergarden, many secrets are waiting to be unfolded. As someone who loves solving puzzles and playing games, Evergarden instantly became one of my go-to games. If you want to relax, but keep your brain entertained at the same time, this is the game to go.

Graphics: 9

Music: 8

Story: 7

Controls: 10

Gameplay: 9

OVERALL SCORE: 8.6

Check Out the Evergarden Steam Trailer:

Evergarden is available for PC, Mac, and Linux via Steam.