So I’ve been meaning to write a bit about a game I played last month called Escape from Ever After. If you’re looking for your next Paper Mario hit after playing Bug Fables, this is one solid game.
The basic premise is that the main character, Flynt Buckler, is at his usual business invading the local dragon’s tower to slay her and save the town. But when he arrives to the tower, he finds it turned into office space and his nemesis turned down to his size and almost powerless. The two come to find out that they are “just” storybook characters whose book has been invaded by Ever After Inc, a megacorp expanding into storybooks to take the characters and put them to work. Flynt and his dragon nemesis, Tinder, are forced to cooperate and join the company with plans to destroy it from within. From there they set across various storybook worlds, like one based on the Three Little Pigs or one based on Shadows Over Innsmouth, meeting various characters and assembling a ragtag group of misfits with the same cause.
Gameplay is 100% Paper Mario inspired. You explore the over world with Flynt and one of his four companions, who can quickly be switched out to use their different abilities, like Tinder’s fire breath or the Big Bad Wolf’s musical numbers. You can find useful items, equitable badges - I mean, trinkets - hidden sun stones to exchange for rare items, and so on.
As you can see, battles look similar to PM but have a bit more depth. You aren’t locked to Flynt and a partner, as he can be switched out for any other character leading to whatever combo works for the battle. When you select a move you have to complete a simple action command for best effect, mostly similar to PM’s but usually pretty smooth and easy.
You’re forced to use all available characters and moves, because enemies have various counters preventing any one strategy from working. The image above features a blue humanoid robot with electricity coming into him from the small boy in the back - this is a shield, so the back enemy has to be defeated first, but only certain moves can freely hit the back. The middle enemy is two little guys stacked up, and some moves can pierce enemy stacks leading to it being better to strike in that way rather than one at a time. Your abilities are effected by various equipable trinkets, which can be used to learn new moves or increase stats or add a risk/reward element that the P-Up, D-Down badge in Mario. The game has multiple difficulty options; I mostly played on Hard which I felt gave a good challenge for a PM vet but wasn’t obnoxious and grindy or anything.
The world is peppered with fun dialogue, a lot of which pokes fun at our modern day stupidity and late-stage capitalism. I will say that I think advertising with “Fight Capitalism” was a dumb move, there is a lot more depth to it than just that and the game’s message is mostly against huge corporations than capitalism in general, which is good because I thought it’d be really obnoxious from the advertising.
The writing was actually surprisingly good at points - there’s one character you’ll meet who struggles with being created and brought to life solely as a mascot for Ever After Inc., or one whose storybook has been forgotten and is fading away into nothingness who feels that Ever After Inc saved him from being erased with it. I’d say it has a strong start and a strong end game, with a fine middle game but unfortunately kind of drops the ball right at the end - not in a way that retroactively ruins anything, just kind of a super quick wrap up.
I don’t think it’s quite as good as Bug Fables - the characters and writing aren’t as entertaining or deep, there isn’t nearly as much world building and side content, and it’s much shorter although that isn’t always a bad thing. But it is very good in its own right. If you need more Paper Mario and have played the original two games to death, I am confident you’ll find this a nice change and well worth the time.
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