A surrealist caricature of vibrant colours, absurdist personalities, and warped music—Everhood 2 is the latest project from the creative minds of Chris Nordgren and Jordi Roca. Following Everhood in 2021, this sequel takes on the tough task of evolving what was already a strong concept. These are rhythm game battlers where the notes aren’t just your obstacles but also tools to fight back against your foe. With a strong identity for the strange and bizarre, this sequel will have you puzzled, amused, and befuddled with its off-kilter sense of humour and endlessly entertaining visual shenanigans.

The player character in Everhood 2 is a being of pure light, who, now thrust into a strange and stimulating world of audio/visual oddity, is on a journey to slay the Mind Dragon with the help of a mysterious raven. Your journey will take you to different corners of this bizarre world full of characters who are as inscrutable as they are charming.

Everhood 2 is an action RPG eccentric. It borrows ideas from the genre but really paves its own path, never fully committing to the idea and probably better off because of it. Each musical battle will grant the player experience and there are even opportunities to get new weapons and level them up to be more powerful. It’s incredibly RPG-lite, with the systems in place not really adding a huge layer of depth or strategy to the proceedings. New weapons, for instance, aren’t even introduced into the game for a few hours which is a sizable way into the game’s total runtime. Even once introduced, they’re quite limited in number and don’t have many meaningful mechanical differences from one to another. With that said, Everhood 2 shines in many of its mechanical simplicities. Whilst opportunities for expansion are still very apparent, the experience present is more than enough to deliver engaging gameplay and this is largely thanks to the aforementioned musical battles.

Everhood 2 is at its strongest when it begins messing with the player. This is a game that wants to keep you on your toes and if you ever start to feel comfortable, expect a new twist on the horizon. Particular battles within the game stand out firmly because they don’t stick to the status quo. We saw this in the original too, but it’s those moments when the game screen turns upside down, or the screen splits into multiple versions of itself, or some other peculiarity takes place leaving you madly scrambling to reorient yourself and make sense of the absolute tomfoolery in front of you. At times, Everhood 2 feels like you’re navigating a hallucinogenic episode and it’s here where the game’s magic is palpable.

Potentially a victim of its own success, the wildness of the game has to continue to build to ensure the player is constantly pleasantly surprised. In a way, it also had to build on the original as well. I’d say the game somewhat succeeds here. Unfortunately, for every mind-boggling and awe-inspiring battle that arises, there are a small handful of rehashed clashes that quickly begin to feel like padding. Everhood 2 can suffer from the random encounter conundrum that plagues other RPGs. In order to continue to level and progress, there needs to be a continued stream of encounters that just eventually feel stale. Battle the same wacky dude 2 or 3 times and you may start trying to avoid running into them again. This is a content avoidance technique I would have never guessed I’d be encouraged to engage in for Everhood 2, yet here we are.