Some of these puzzles are really intuitive as you must swap between PS1-style 3D graphics and flat SNES-like visuals.

It’s a nice straight forward quest which doesn’t require much thinking even though you will have a few puzzles to solve along the way. You’re a guy who meets a girl and you end up on a mini-adventure together as you chase after the guy who attacked her village. There is a story buried within this first game but it doesn’t really stick out. However, purchase a DVD drive and the loading times will vanish – pure genius! That’s right, upon unlocking the pre-rendered backdrops, the game adds in loading times between screens, something we all had to put up with back in the day. You’ll find things like 16/256 colours, a 3D map, random encounters, music, a backstory, NPCs, and even pre-rendered backgrounds like we saw in games such as Final Fantasy VII. Each time you find a new chest in the world, you’ll unlock a new mechanic or art style.

That’s where this game thrives and stands out from the crowd of ‘retro-like’ games, it doesn’t try to be old-school, it literally IS old-school as it recreates the original styles.

It’s like ‘the history of RPG games’ in one package! Upon obtaining a chest, you can now move left, then up and down soon you’ll be moving from screen to screen with per-screen transitions followed by smooth scrolling. You begin the game as a blocky GameBoy sprite who can only move right. I’ve played this game before and replaying it on the PS4 brought back a lot of fond memories. I’m not saying the game is bad, it’s just rather short, clocking in at around three hours, and it seems to shove visual and mechanical gimmicks into the gameplay more than a solid story. The transition from one style to the next is cool.Īs I stated above, the original Evoland feels like a proof of concept which was put together with the game created as an afterthought.

Downloading Evoland Legendary Edition