Ever Forward is the lates😼t project from indie game developer Pathea Studio - the team that brou𝓡ght us the RPG and simulation game, My Time at Portia, which currently sits at a “Very Positive” . Given the success of My Time at Portia, it would likely bꦛe very easy for Pathea Studio to stay within the realm of the crafting/farming sim and RPG genre, continuing to churn out similar content or even building out My Time at Portia more than they already have. However, Ever Forward takes a pretty hard turn from what My Time at Portia has to offer with its challenging puzzles, emot💟ional narrative, and its overall mysterious and surreal tone. What’s even more impressive is that this is all found just in the game’s demo.
The beginning of Ever Forward’s demo drops players i🧸nto the role of Maya, a young girl who finds herself on a beautiful, sunshine-drenched beachಞ island. A weird, floating cube follows her around as she runs through the sand, on which she leaves detailed tiny footprints, while the sound of calm waves fills the otherwise silent area.
Then, Maya happens upon what looks like a ruin of some sort, with a tiny, leafless tree sticking out of the rubble. Once she enters the area, players are transported to another more surreal world in which abstracཧt structures float in the air while a massive, lifeless tree with burning roots hangs overhead. Maya is limited to certain platforms in this new world, each containing logic🐽al puzzles that are reminiscent of other logic puzzlers, such as the Portal series. In fact, that’s where Maya’s cube-com🐽panion comes in.
Maya is able to generate Portal-esque cubes that can be used as weights or “keys” for certain buttons that allow her to progress through each puzzle. The cube 𝐆can also be thrown to areas that Maya can’t immediately reach, or used as a distraction for the security droids that Maya has to avoid, lest she be spotted and vaporized by the droid’s laser. Maya can also use the cube to fly from one puzzle to the next.
The puzzles themselves in Ever Forward are well-executed and are by no means a walk in the park. They unsurprisingly increase in difficulty as players progress through the game, a🅰nd require a bit more thoughtfulness to solve than other puzzle games. Often, I found myself having to think a few steps ahead or work backwards from my hypothesized solution in order to make sense of the puzzle’s logic. It’s been a while since I’ve encountered puzzles that were this based on logic and didn’t have a workaround solution. It was surprisingly refreshing to have to focus all of my mental capacity on a single solution.
As puzzles are solved, dream-like cutscenes play, giving players a glimpse into Maya’s history and family life, along with a situation going on in the world that forced citizens to remain in their homes for extended durations (which hits p🌠retty close to home given the current state of the world in real-life). Although the demo’s voiceover audio was in Japanese and seemed to cut in and out during my playthrough, the themes and tone of the conversations (viewable in English subti💟tles) hit an emotional note that I wasn’t expecting. This, coupled with the ambient musical score that plays throughout the game, did enough to make me invested in Maya’s story and care about seeing her through this adventure safely.
Ever Forward’s short, playable demo is enough to make me excited about the full release, which as of now, has no set time frame. There are certainly technical glitches and the aforementioned audio issues to b♛e ironed out. Choppy moments of gameplay and cutscenes were the main of🅰fenders, but none of the issues encountered were game-breaking. If anything, it was the mystery surrounding Maya and her story that kept me immersed enough to overlook any negatives that the game threw at me. That alone gives me high hopes for the game’s full release.
Ever Forward is available now as a playable prologue .