I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I jumped into Everdeep Aurora. I was instantly charmed by the off-white, creamy accents and its retro aesthetic, and figured that would’ve been all I needed to be convinced to check it out. I like pretty things and I don’t hate Metroidvanias. Surely I’d be in for a good time.
As it turns out, I was wrong. Everdeep Aurora has moments of genuine brilliance and charm, but it’s held back by frustrating design decisions.
The game wastes no time in throwing you straight into the action. The world is on the verge of entering an apocalyptic era. A meteor shower is raining down on the surface, and the entire population needs to start burrowing underground to stay safe. You take control of Shell, an adorable little cat who’s been separated from her mother. Your objective is simple: go underground and find her again.
Everdeep Aurora is quick to present Shell with a drill, which will serve as your main tool for progress. Using the d-pad, you can point the drill in any direction and remove obstacles in your path. This is how you get underground. As you dig deeper in, you’ll start to discover more underground denizens and mysterious rooms that you won’t be able to figure out quite just yet.
It’s here where Everdeep Aurora starts to show some of its flaws. The underground section, while not particularly massive, can be a confusing labyrinth. There’s no mini-map to speak of, which means you’re largely left to blindly explore your surroundings, hoping you’ll stumble upon something useful that might help you progress through the story. It doesn’t help that your drill needs to be powered up too, so if it runs out of juice, you’ll need to find a recharge point. And when you don’t have a mini-map, well, it becomes difficult to keep track of the game’s points of interest and Everdeep Aurora quickly becomes a rather frustrating affair.
As you continue exploring, you’ll also find yourself in little puzzle rooms. Some of these are platforming affairs, which may require you to acquire a special item or ability in order to progress, while others don’t offer up any clues at all, and it may take you a good while before you finally realize you were supposed to interact with that one specific object to find a little critter that helps you move on. I hate to be tough on Everdeep Aurora for daring to be obtuse and leaving the player on their own to figure things out, but here’s the thing. When there’s no clear way of keeping track of where you’ve been and where the important rooms are, this becomes tiresome.
There’s a fair bit of backtracking to do too, as you run into new NPCs that may task you with finding randon objects for them. And as you might expect, without any sort of mini-map or compass, even if you manage to find the item they need, it might take a bit before you find the relevant NPC again.
I guess it’s a good thing, then, that Everdeep Aurora is such a pretty game. The retro graphical style is striking, complete with unique character designs that did keep me feeling excited to see who I’d run into next. Whether it was a giant mama owl wrapped in a cloak or a suspicious looking cat with narrowed eyes in a hood, meeting a new NPC in Everdeep Aurora always felt like a treat, even if that sense of excitement quickly dissipated when I realized I’d have to go on yet another fetch quest for them. Boo.
It’s tough for me to recommend Everdeep Aurora even to fans of the genre. What feels like they should be mainstays of the Metroidvania genre are absent here, and the exploration just isn’t compelling enough for me to want to bust out a notebook and manually keep track of what I’ve found. It’s clear that Everdeep Aurora has a lot of heart. I just wish it actually had some meat on its bones too.
A review code for the game was provided by the publisher. You can check out our review policy here. Reviewed on PC.
