Evan’s Remains, by Matías Schmied, is like most of my relationships: short, sweet, and kind of twisted. If you are good at puzzles (which I am not), this puzzle-platformer will only take you an afternoon to finish. However it will likely be a few days before you can stop thinking about it. The puzzles are fun, yes, and the art style is strangely beautiful, but the game’s true strength lies in its deceptive plot and engrossing characters.
The Premise
The premise is simple: You play as Dysis, a girl who received a mysterious letter detailing the coordinates of an unknown island. She goes there hoping to find the runaway genius-celebrity Evan Goldstein. There, she finds ancient monoliths that spell out a message that is crucial to one of the enigmatic figures she encounters. Other than that, I cannot say more for fear of spoilers. Believe me, though, if you like a good mystery, unexpected plot twists, or something that makes you question the nature of morality, you will want to pick up Evan’s Remains.
The Game
Your goal in each puzzle is to vault over a tall green pillar on the right of the screen. Achieving this rewards you with a little bouquet of flowers blooming atop that pillar as you pass over it. To reach the goal, you must jump across various types of platforms. The basic platform disappears the moment you step off of it. Others make vanished platforms reappear and visa versa, some let you jump higher, some teleport you, some change the platforms’ properties… You get the idea.
The controls likewise only involve moving and jumping. Simple. No extra fiddly bits and no additional mechanics that are not already in the puzzles themselves. Those controls work seamlessly, allowing precision and flowing movement that does the job perfectly
The game requires more thinking than it does coordination, leaning more into the puzzle element than platforming. Considering how I’m about as dexterous as an epileptic seal, that’s just fine by me. Also, if you make a mistake, the puzzles are not so overly complicated that you have to spend ten or fifteen minutes just trying to reset them. Some of the puzzles repeat themselves and there is no real difficulty curve (which the story addresses), causing some puzzles to be considerably more difficult than whatever came before or what comes after. If a puzzle is too difficult or you and just want to see what happens next in the plot, there is also a lovely “Skip Puzzle” option in the pause menu. Either way, you might spend as much time absorbing the story as you do solving puzzles.
In short, Evan’s Remains is a fun, casual title that is as much a game as it is a medium and vehicle for storytelling.
I spent way too long speculating as to what these structures used to be.
Atmosphere
It’s hard to say which Evan’s Remains does better: Gameplay or graphics. The main character’s sprite is pixelated and you can pick out the tiny blocks in the scenery if you look very closely, but how the game uses pixels is borderline gorgeous. The scenery at the beginning is your stereotypical tropical paradise with a few ancient ruins thrown in. Nothing terribly interesting, though pretty enough. As you move through different areas, though, the setting changes to alluring evenings with shimmering moonlight illuminating the landscape and rich fields carpeted in carmine blossoms, among others. These act as backdrops for the moments between puzzles, yes, but they also play beautifully into the emotional storytelling.
While the visuals are arresting, the music is a bit lacking. The main menu music is lovely and sets a fairly high bar for the game. Once you start playing, though, the soundtrack feels like it was inspired by “Tron goes on a tropical vacation.” The sounds can be a bit abrasive and arcade-y at times, yet that is only if you pay close attention. The music is unobtrusive and, even though it is not the most tuneful, it likewise compliments the general atmosphere.
Narrative Choices
The first thing that stuck out to me is that the girl you play as, Dysis, is not a gorgeous woman. She is not your typical model or femme fatale. Rather, she is actually kind of gangly. Dysis is cute enough, sure, but nothing stunning, which makes for an interesting character model choice and I am all about it! It makes her more relatable in a lot of ways.
The developer even addresses early in the game the glaring plot hole of why Dysis does not simply walk or swim around the monoliths as everyone else would. When asked why, she replies in a sarcastic, grumpy way that matches her character perfectly. Though it makes her sound a little prissy, it also makes her endearing and juxtaposes well with the emotional brick she is talking to. Oh, and that “brick?” He may be inexpressive and fairly uncomplicated, but it is hard not to feel for and love him. Likewise, there is only one character in the game that I cannot empathize with or want to know more about and he only shows up a couple of times. That is the mark of a pretty great cast if you ask me.
Seriously, you will love this guy after a while.
My only qualm with the story is that it culminates into something of an info dump at the end. This is not just in terms of the mystery’s pieces falling into place either. Pretty much the entire story is laid out with no gameplay left over at that point. It’s all exposition. That being said, it’s still an engrossing, sweet, sad, and morally complicated story. There are a couple of questions that don’t get answered, but that’s okay because those questions aren’t really what the story is about. Answers to them would have certainly added to the story, but they were not strictly necessary. If anything, the little hints at the backstory encourage players to speculate and think about the characters on a deeper level.
Last Thoughts
Few games are worth replaying, in my opinion, but this might be one of them. The replay value for this title is not in terms of variety of choices or play styles, though. This is one of those games where the reward in replaying the exact same thing is in the story. Going through Evan’s Remains a second time, you might notice details in the plot or the scenery that you had not before, letting you put a couple more pieces of the puzzle together, or it may simply allow you to appreciate the narrative that much more, now that you have a fairly complete understanding. That being said, there is still one and only one way to go about this game. Thus, if you are not invested in the story, then it has minimal replay value except for maybe in speedrunning.
On the whole, though, Evan’s Remains is a simple, solid, and entrancing title. It is one of the better games that I have reviewed here and is one that I will heartily recommend to nearly anyone else. Now I want to look into whatever else this developer has made and will make.
Bravo, Schmied. Bravo.
