Welcome to our little preview of the puzzle game called Ever Forward, out soon on Steam!
Ever Forward is an adventure puzzle game — it is the story of Maya. Maya is lost in a strange world somewhere between reality and imagination. She is alone to confront her despair on her journey of discovery, where she must unlock her memories and confront her fears to unravel the secrets of the world. Players will need to use their observational skills and intelligence to solve multiple puzzles to piece together the mystery of Maya’s past and what dark secrets she has buried.
For more than three years, our designers racked their brains, designing puzzles with the “puzzle gamer” in mind. Players will feel deeply challenged and motivated to solve each puzzle, and some puzzles have multiple ways of being completed to fit different kinds of thinkers and logical processes.
A color pallet of soothing pastels and futuristic tones designed to simulate the absurd nature of the dream world. Players can collect fragments of memories in the world to unlock new areas and new puzzles. Mechanics range from simple movement and jump to teleportation and gravity control; the player must use stealth and observational skills to navigate each puzzle.
The demo we played had approximately 40% of the final content and features available so do take some of our critiques and cheers with a pinch of salt. There is no way of knowing if anything will change or improve. Let us start by saying I had some issues with the first few minutes of the games due to my laptop and not because of the game itself, I think.
As this is a beta version, I do not know if this was hardcoded into the game or not, but living in Belgium, we do not have your everyday qwerty keyboard but we use the azerty one (like in france). This basically meant I was pressing the down button to move forward. It took me a while to get the hang of this, so I decided to search for my controller and play that way.
Sadly that was impossible too. I noticed no controller support in the game and I was reluctant to create a mapped layout profile just for this demo alone. So I went for my Surface Pro 7 and reinstalled it there. I had a qwerty keyboard for that, sadly that one is not as powerful as my Asus TUF.
Having to play with downscaled graphics was not really an issue, though I did miss the higher resolution for the cutscenes in between puzzles. Needless to say this game is actually gorgeous and well, it is quite a good game to play as well.
The puzzles are smart and just work well. The first big puzzle, I will shed some light on what I had to do to finish it. From sneaking past a robot to picking up a cube, putting the cube down to activate a platform. Then picking up that same cube, run across the platform that just freed up and hope you do not fall into the abyss.
This game really does a lot of things right and if the controller support is up and running, I would love to play more. I actually think this game deserves to be published on multiple platforms as it is simply gorgeous and a more than decent puzzle all around.
Can not wait to get the final game in my hands to try that out!
