A Cozy Game Review For Everafter Falls
Everafter Falls is advertised as a cozy game. I recently purchased it from Steam for $19.99 with my own real adult money. It is rated 2000+ as very positive, published by Akupara Games, and developed by SquareHusky.
You can play Everafter Falls on Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Windows PC, Linux, and macOS.
I played it on my PC on my time off. Here’s what I thought about it.
Steam Describes this Casual Cozy Game As:
Rediscover the simple life. Farm, fish, forge and fight to restore the peace in an all-new farming adventure. Features split-screen coop, a helpful pet, automated drones, resourceful pixies, a card-eating progression system, and dangerous dungeons to delve into!
My First Impressions of this Cozy Game:
My At-A-Glance Game Review for Everafter Falls, a cozy pixel art game:
- Story: ⭐⭐⭐
- Quests/Tasks: ⭐⭐⭐
- Art Style: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
- Combat: ⭐⭐
- Controls:⭐⭐⭐
- Music: ⭐⭐⭐
Everafter Falls is a cozy game about gathering, collecting, farming, mining, and defeating evil baddies within the mine while helping the people in your peaceful town. It provides a split-screen co-op option, but since my partner in crime and husband aren’t a fan of these games, I played solo and cannot speak to the features or gameplay in co-op mode.
After roughly 41.1 hours played, I have realized that this game’s pace is perhaps meant to be slower and more deliberate than most, from my perspective. I am not big into playing the market and amassing heaps of gold as soon as possible, so I can see where some fellow players, mentioning the leisurely pace of planting, watering, and growing, can affect the enjoyment of the game.
Story, Quests and Tasks:
The story is tied to your progression through crafting or item donation for various villagers’ needs. Villagers will seek items and your help to build items that unlock story beats and insights into life at Everafter Falls. But Everafter Falls doesn’t do a lot of hand-holding when explaining everything, what it does, and how to unlock or utilize a few things within this cozy pixel game.
For instance, I found the Everafter Falls Reddit forum invaluable for seeking information about crafting machine layouts, the steps to crafting, and how things worked, like pixies, which I relied heavily on.
Combat:
Combat revolves around and happens within the mine dungeons. There are four dungeons, each a bit tougher than the other. They are unlocked through cursed runes, which you will then work with a villager to remove the curse and place the rune on a podium, unlocking one of the four dungeons.
Inside the dungeon are valuable ores, stones, chests, enemies, and captured creatures to rescue, allowing you to unlock more health points or other boons for your character. To get better at combating the enemies and eventual boss(es) found in the dungeon, you will work to upgrade your sword, equip rings, necklaces, and other accessories, and unlock abilities for your pet and your eventual robot drone friend.
Combat here isn’t very complicated, but the process of getting your tools and accessories powered enough to handle what the dungeon throws at you is–you guessed it–slow. I enjoyed the rewards of combat more than the combat itself, but that could be my dopamine, reward-seeking brain.
Controls:
I have an 88BitDo controller hooked up to my PC, which I attempted to use at first. This is 100% my personal preference, but I found that a good ol’ fashioned mouse and keyboard worked best for me. It could be my age or other unimportant factors, but accuracy and not accidentally aiming the wrong way/digging the wrong hole/placing something one space off of where I wanted it to go was an issue with the controller I did not encounter with the keyboard and mouse. As the saying goes, “Your mileage may vary.”
Hot Take – Fishing Mini Game:
I wouldn’t say I liked the fishing mini-game. That’s on me; you may enjoy it, but if you find it a bit too complicated or frustrating, you can turn the mini-game off in settings.
What Makes It Unique?
- Craft special bottles, offer food at Pixie shrines (either built by you or the one in town), and pixies will show up. You can then capture these pixies in a bottle and assign them tasks according to their color to gather, mine, or speed up the process of crafting and resource gathering.
- Your skills for many things and advancing them can be found in cards. You don’t collect them. You eat the cards.
- You get drones through tasks or by building them that expand inventory, help gather, help water, and shoot laser beams at your enemies.
The opening animation for Everafter Falls got a bark of unexpected and amused laughter from me. I won’t spoil it, but I will tell you I assumed it would take the same route many cozy farm games do. You know the formula: you inherit a farm or feel tired of city life, so you take a bus and ride into the country.
There’s a bus involved, okay. But it takes you to Everafter in a way that is a bit different from the usual.
What made Everafter Falls feel unique to me was the addition of a personal pet, catching pixies and drones. These drones are available as task rewards, can be constructed by you with rare(er) materials, or can be purchased from the general store. There are harvester drones that will harvest your garden for you, watering drones that will water a section that can be increased by adding drone parts, and a companion drone that you can equip that not only will expand your inventory but can have additional features unlocked to make it a great battle companion with lasers.
Pixies can gather materials for you during the day, and once you go to bed, they drop everything they gather off near the shrine in town for you in a chest for you to pick up the next day.
Your pet, which you unlock almost immediately, helps you till soil and water plants and is extremely helpful. As you progress and unlock more of the game, you can also increase the amount of tilled spots and water and even equip an attack for your pet to help in the dungeon mines.
How do you unlock all these additional skills and attributes for yourself, your pet, and your drone while utilizing pixies again? Through cards.
Do you equip these cards? Nope. As I said, you eat them. Eventually, you can turn the letters your villagers send you into recycled materials, which provide a blank card paper that you can then spend cash to print them at a print shop in town.
Why do I think Everafter Falls Appeals to Patient Players?
You can play this game however you like, but it takes time for everything. Everafter Falls wants you to discover, grow, craft, and collect all over the map, with time locks on everything. Want silk to make silk ropes? Well, it takes your silkworms time. You can speed this process up by utilizing your captured pixies, which can also help you gather, but again, yep, that takes time.
What Did I Think about This Overall?
I like the slow pace of farming. However, once you get the hothouse to grow any vegetable at any time of year, you have a lot of space. And that space needs to be planted, then seeded, then watered. You do get help in the form of tiny pixellated robotic friends.
Regarding in-game cash, I find it takes several days and about three seconds to spend massive amounts of it. So be prepared to invest your effort into making money for upgrades, new cards, farm expansions, house expansions, etc.
The cards and getting ahead financially seem challenging because I keep squandering all my patiently grown gold in pumpkin stocks in upgrading tools.
You can gather:
- Bugs
- Wood, Light Wood, Dark Wood
- Pixies in a bottle (sung to the tune of “Message in a Bottle,” by Sting and The Police.”)
- Flowers
- Wild berries
- Mushrooms
- Fish
- Treasure Chests
- Metals
- Sap
- Eventually, cook
- Garden
- Mine
- Magical Jewelry with stats that make battle, growing, fishing, minding, and movement better
- Drones that make life easier
Is Everafter Falls Accessible?
There are a few accessibility features that you may enjoy. You can tone down the colors, disable background animations, screen shake, and torch and lighting flicker effects, disable all weather effects, and utilize colorblind assistance.
You can make the UI larger, and as someone with bad eyesight, I embiggened my UI immediately; otherwise, I found myself constantly suspiciously squinting at my map and toolbar.
There is an easy mode that reduces the monster’s attack and hit points, but once you start the game, you cannot change it back to normal.
I am not hearing nor vision impaired, with relatively good hand mobility, so I feel that I cannot speak to accessibility further when it comes to these aspects.
Is Everafter Falls Worth Your Time?
As gaming recommendations for pixel art games go, coming from someone with a full-time job that often leaves my brain feeling drained at the end of the day, if you enjoy a game with many different parts that eventually come together with time spent in-game and out, then yes.
Everafter Falls encourages all kinds of gameplay. Do you like to min/max your playing style? Would you rather fish the day away beside a babbling brook or seaside until the silver stars twinkle? Does stubbornly insisting on having one of everything found, collected, and cataloged sound like your jam? Yes! Try this game!
However, if taking 7 days of in-game time to grow a particularly lucrative crop is not your jam, you may want to sit back and watch for other reviews that get into the technical weeds or wait until the game provides possible means to help speed that up.
If all of the above still sounds o.k. to you, then yes! I recommend that you try Everafter Falls.
Everafter Falls is a cozy game you need at least to put on your cozy game radar or wishlist. I believe there is still a demo available on Steam. I love that developers/studios provide them and encourage hesitant gamers who can’t make up their minds via gameplay trailers alone to get their hands on a demo and try it themselves.
Everafter nudges you to be cautious with your time, which, given everything, seems like a pretty essential and enjoyable aspect that may work for you.
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