Seventh Cross: Evolution is a 1998 Dreamcast game, and was a launch title for the system in Japan. It's an evolution sim: one member of that tiny little genre where you are a creature, and your only goal is survival. To survive, you must feed on other creatures in the world around you and avoid getting eaten yourself. And, as you grow more powerful, you can change your very form, adapting to different environments and prey. Some other games in the genre include E.V.O.: Search for Eden, Cubivore: Survival of the Fittest, and parts of Spore.
It had pretty realistic graphics for a 1998 Dreamcast game, which is to say that these days they can most charitably be described as charmingly low-poly. The gameplay loop is exploring fairly drab environments, hunting other creatures and battling a few bosses, then using the nutrients you gain from feeding to morph the nameless protagonist into a multitude of different forms. And to get access to those forms, you draw pictures in a 10 x 10 grid using points you gain from slaying other creatures. Again, speaking very charitably, Seventh Cross: Evolution is... mostly very chill. Some would say boring. I say chill. (And that's a large "mostly.")
The English box description says it's an endless game, and that's a lie. There is a coherent progression through different phases of the game, and when the story finally comes in about 90% of the way through, it zooms off somewhere very strange yet poignant, and in the direction of three distinct endings.
There isn't a whole lot of documentation of the game online, and, like... I understand why. It's weird, it's clunky, it was nothing revolutionary in its day and it hasn't aged well. It's so niche that the odds of it ever being ported to something besides the Dreamcast are exceptionally small, especially since the company that made it went under. It's abandonware that very few people would be interested in.
But there's just something about it that I keep coming back to. Maybe it's the designs of both the protagonist and the various creatures he hunts. Maybe it's that it's in a tiny genre that very few people care about but I love. Maybe it's the fact that it is not only the only game I've ever played that has one of those "this is a work of fiction" disclaimers that films and books tend to have, but also the only game I know of that, in one ending, goes out on a (probably misattributed) Albert Einstein quote.
Maybe it's just that I played it at a particular moment in my life and it lucked out to be something formative for me.
Whatever the reason, I would like to preserve some of it on the Internet. I would like everyone to know that once, there was an odd Dreamcast game, and it had some really neat creature designs. It was made by good people doing good work, and if they perhaps overshot their budget and the technology available at the time, they had something to say with their offbeat Dreamcast launch title. And in some ways, they said it beautifully.
Sit down for a while, and let me tell you about Seventh Cross: Evolution.