EverHood

Everhood is an adventure RPG that focuses on a battle system based on a rhythm game as opposed to a strategy or turn-based combat system. Exploration of the game's world is done by navigating various environments from a top-down perspective. Everhood's environments are largely characterized by minimalistic designs against black backgrounds, with few branching paths to explore or secrets to find. In each location, the player can interact with various characters or face different minigames and puzzles, each of which gives a reward to progress the plot or one of several sidequests.

Much of the game's focus is on its battle system. The battlefield consists of five lanes resembling those present in the Guitar Hero series. Attacks timed with the music appear and move downwards towards the player at the bottom of the lanes; the player can jump left to right to dodge these oncoming attacks. Each enemy in the game has their own battle theme, and will time their attacks to the song's beat.

Everhood's world is composed of multiple separate areas, such as a carnival, a mushroom forest, and a desert. Many of these areas are not directly connected, but can be accessed from the central Cosmic Hub, an empty space with paths connecting various doors. These areas are inhabited by a diverse cast of characters, many named after colors; such as the player character itself, Red, as well as Blue Thief, Professor Orange, and the Green, Purple, and Brown Mages, among others.

It is gradually revealed that Everhood is the tattered remains of an ancient realm of immortals. Its remaining inhabitants mostly do not enjoy existence, being driven to insanity by countless years of boredom, but fear oblivion too much to accept death. The player must choose between killing them or leaving them to their immortal existence.

Everhood began development in 2018 as a collaboration between Spanish game developer Jordi Roca and Swedish visual effects artist Chris Nordgren. At the time, Roca was a freelance developer with a background in mobile development from studio LittleStone, and Nordgren was working as an artist for Mojang Studios on the team for Minecraft Dungeons. The two started development of a game together that wouldn't compete with the projects they were already working on. io in August 2018, and development of a full release was announced in December of that year.

The demo took 4-5 months to create. The game was built using Unity; battles were designed by starting with a song, then developing a character concept that would fit it. Musical artists would generally develop a song based on a theme that developers Nordgren and Roca would then work around to create a character and battle that matched; for more pivotal battles, musical composition was more pointedly directed to deliver the desired effect within the story. The story was largely improvised as development went on.

Everhood received positive reviews upon its release, with several reviewers commenting on the variety of musical scores and high level of quality in how battles are presented. The PlayStation versions of the game, released in 2023, received scores of 7 and 8/10. Issues raised were the potentially overwhelming visuals and lack of differences between difficulty levels.

Zoey Handley of Destructoid praised the music in the game, but noted that the story threw in too many plot twists. Alana Hagues and Ollie Reynolds, writing for RPGFan and Nintendo Life, respectively, found the game's musical score to be one of its highlights, particularly its variation and ability to combine with the unique visuals during fights. A review from Jeuxvideo.com highlighted the soundtrack as well, while also noting that a mode existed to allow the player to ignore the story and simply play through the battles, experiencing the music again.