The narrative of Evergate centers on Ki, a child-like, glowing spirit who arrives in the afterlife ready to pass through the titular Evergate to reincarnate. Before Ki can make the transition, the gate is suddenly disrupted, forcing the small soul to dive into the memories of past lives to uncover a deep connection with a kindred spirit. This premise sets the stage for an emotional journey that sheds the standard, cold nature of death, and instead turns it into more of a reflection of love and personal reflection.
As Ki ventures deeper into the metaphysical realm, the story is told across several books, each exploring unique historical tapestries or murals that span from ancient China to a neon-drenched near-future. These tapestries weave together complex themes of generational drama, grief, and the bitter reality of how the people we love can disappoint us. Evergate cleverly utilizes beautiful, minimalist pictorial panels at the end of major chapters to quietly show, rather than tell, the sweeping tragedies and triumphs of these interconnected souls and story elements.
On the surface, Evergate dresses itself up as a traditional 2D platformer, but underneath that cozy exterior lies a punishing, physics based puzzle experience that prioritizes rigid planning over improvisational reflex. The core mechanical hook revolves around Ki’s “Soulflame,” a precise laser beam that allows you to slow time to a crawl mid-air and aim at specific nodes known as crystals.
To activate a crystal’s unique properties, the crystal must be aligned directly between Ki and the glowing white background called the Source. These abilities that you can get from activating the crystals range from catapulting you across the screen to spawning a solid, floating platform beneath your feet. All of which do a great job to help you get from start to finish on each stage.
These crystals are rather diverse and interact with one another to build intricate, interlocking navigational riddles. The destination gate of each stage is always placed maliciously out of reach. Because of this, you’re required to chain multiple crystal reactions together without touching a hazard or falling into a bottomless pit. Doing either of these things will have you starting the sequence all over from the start.
Replayability is tightly woven into the experience via a three objective structure for each of the game’s seventy-plus levels. Beyond simply reaching the exit, you are challenged to break every single crystal in the stage and beat a tightly tuned time trial, though trying to accomplish all three in a single run is practically impossible. Completing these challenges awards essence that unlocks artifacts that you can equip. These artifacts can provide passive bonuses like an enhanced jump height or resistance to hazards. Unlocking these artifacts and using them combined with the challenge aspect, really gives you a reason to keep coming back to these stages at least a few times.
Visually, Evergate utilizes a stunning, hand-drawn art style that features a gorgeous, brushed watercolor effect across its layered environments. The artistic direction masterfully highlights natural landscapes and manages to create a dreamlike representation of the afterlife. This artistic direction makes the environments feel both hauntingly desolate and comforting at the same time.
The game’s environmental variety is rather impressive as the parallax scrolling backgrounds shift drastically from lush oriental gardens to sterile, high tech industrial landscapes. Each distinct era introduces its own visual language that is themed to match the environment. This ensures that the background scenery never feels static or completely recycled as you hop between memories. The visual execution of the crystals themselves deserves praise, as they radiate with highly saturated colors and explode into sharp, crystalline particles whenever they are successfully pierced by the blinding white light of your Soulflame.
If there is any visual critique to be made, it has to be the lack of depth layers in the immediate foreground. The lack of these layers can occasionally give certain platforms an amateur and flat appearance as if they are floating independently over the canvas. Additionally, because the puzzle mechanics demand uniform visual queues so the player knows exactly what can be interacted with, the interactive assets don’t visually evolve enough to be effective. What happens is that the backgrounds in each stage evolve and change beautifully while the interactive elements needed to solve puzzles occasionally change and alter themselves. This causes issues in the way the interactive elements are presented and cause issues when it comes to solving some of the puzzles.
Evergate on the Xbox Series X plays very well. It has some great optimization and it shows that a lot of care and work went into making sure the game performs well. For starters, the game targets and manages to maintain a solid 60FPS at a super sharp 4K resolution. The high framerate and sharp resolution ensures that the game is very responsive when it comes to the precision platforming nature of the game. The optimization found in this game allows for almost no loading times when installed on the internal SSD. This lack of loading with the trial and error nature of the game makes repeatedly dying a somewhat endurable experience.
Another potential issue when it comes to performance with a game like this is potential for input latency. Well thankfully, Evergate nearly eliminates this thanks to the power of the Xbox Series X and the amount of optimization that this game has had put into it. This is the kind of care and work that we should expect when it comes to a precision platformer where trial and error is a core mechanic of the game.
While the visual presentation is undeniably beautiful despite some issues, it is the spectacular audio design that is where the game truly shines. I am speaking of course about the soundtrack. Composed by M.R. Miller and fully recorded with a live orchestra, the score delivers an incredibly rich and magical soundscape that perfectly blends hauntingly sad and quiet with swells of grand optimism. The orchestrations make brilliant use of era-appropriate instrumentation, subtly weaving traditional Asian string instruments into historical sections without ever feeling stereotypical. In short, this soundtrack is one of the best I have heard in a precision platforming game.
The sound effects provide a highly satisfying, punchy layer of tactile feedback that makes the physics mechanics feel very impactful. Every time your Soulflame pierces a node, it triggers a crisp, glass shattering crunch, and launching off an active crystal rewards you with a bass heavy, booming audio cue that emphasizes the sheer velocity of your movement. These pre-programmed environmental sounds remain consistent regardless of your trajectory, but they are mixed so cleanly into the active gameplay that they never become repetitive or grating during long, repetitive puzzle sessions.
The only slight detraction within the audio package is an occasional disconnect in tone between the music and the late game narrative progression. As Ki uncovers darker, grimmer memories that deal with tragic betrayals and genuine heartbreak, the background tracks occasionally continue to loop cheerful, swelling orchestral motifs that feel slightly at odds with the unfolding drama. It is a minor direction oversight rather than a flaw in the music itself. This differential in tone can cause you to be briefly pulled out of the heavier elements of the story that would otherwise be a very emotional experience.
Evergate is a beautifully crafted and highly intelligent puzzle-platformer that deserves a spot alongside the absolute best of its indie contemporaries. Stone Lantern Games has built something truly special here, successfully smashing expectations when it comes to this genre. This was achieved by delivering a deep, spatial puzzle game disguised as a high-speed platformer. Anchored by an emotionally charged narrative about human relationships and a spectacular live-orchestrated soundtrack, the game manages to infuse a staggering amount of heart and artistic soul into its trial and error design mechanics.
The experience is undeniably demanding, featuring a steep difficulty curve that will thoroughly test your patience, spatial awareness, and precision under intense pressure. Its insistence on rigid, pre-planned solutions to each puzzle and highly unforgiving one hit kill mechanics means it won’t appeal to everyone. Players looking for a loose and improvisational platformer where they can slip through by the skin of their teeth, this title is not for you. However, for those who relish the sweet sense of accomplishment that comes from solving an incredibly intricate riddle or environmental puzzle, Evergate delivers an unmatched level of satisfaction.
Evergate is a game that I would highly recommend for those looking for a deep and unforgiving platforming experience!
Disclaimer: A review key was provided
In addition to writing articles, Ryan Byers also creates content for his YouTube channel called "Obscure Games and Consoles", collects video games, and dabbles in video game development.