Escape from Ever After Review – Paper Mario DNA, Worn Proudly

Escape from Ever After Review

The Paper Mario series has been around for long enough that a lot of people grew up playing those games. It’s been long enough that we should be seeing hordes of imitations and homages on the market. ‘Paper Mario’ should be its own subgenre. To that end, it’s kind of wild that Escape from Ever After didn’t get here sooner. Or maybe this all only makes perfect sense in retrospect. Either way, this game knows what it is and who its audience is, right from the jump. It’s downright refreshing.

Escape from Ever After takes place in a series of classic storybooks. You play as Flynt Buckler, a heroic protagonist on his way to slay a ferocious dragon. Except the castle has been taken over by a massive corporation full of weirdly familiar employees. It’s up to you and your merry band of fairy tale heroes to stop corporate interests from devouring the whole storybook universe.

I can’t overstate how much that A) this game was inspired by Paper Mario and B) this totally rules. You’ve got the action commands, the irreverent writing, the mix of 2D and 3D visuals, and a ton of puzzles to solve. You always hear people bemoaning the lack of original ideas, but sometimes a clear-cut homage is awesome. In this case, it works because the new elements are so fresh. These are clever characters trapped in a bizarre, but relatable, scenario. I recognize these famous stories, but I want to seem them played out in weird new ways.

Old Stories Made New

The nice thing about an homage like Ever After is the mechanics immediately make perfect sense. If you’ve played much of the Paper Mario series, the action commands just fall into place. And if they don’t, you’ve got on-screen prompts that explain them perfectly. I had the attack commands down pretty fast, though defense was another story. Thankfully, there are a handful of difficulty settings you can tweak while you figure things out. It’s a delicate balance, however. Too much tinkering and the game gets either laughably easy or impossibly hard.

Once you’ve found that sweet spot, the fights are a blast. Every character has a distinct set of moves, and you’ll need them all more than you’d expect. Special attacks feel powerful, but there’s an art to their deployment that feels well-crafted and deliberate. You can have two characters in play at once, and said combination is a big part of your battle strategy. You can also use badges to expand your options in combat, a level of strategic depth that I greatly appreciate.

Puzzled But Never Stuck

Exploration and puzzle solving make up a hefty chunk of your playtime, so it’s important that those sections feel balanced. I found the puzzles just tough enough to keep me guessing, but never so obtuse that I got totally stuck. You’re often relying on the powers of your teammates, but in weird and unexpected ways. It’s pretty satisfying to slot some of these solutions into place, and they always make some kind of sense when you get there.

I had a lot of fun with Ever After, but I had to play most of the game on mute. For some reason I really hated the music. It’s not explicitly bad, but something about the instrument choice and execution had me feeling deeply unpleasant after a short while. There’s a brass sting that wraps up every battle, and it slowly wore me down. That, and the music they play in the hub world really bummed me out. My overall opinion of the whole game went up once I started playing with the sound off.

Sounds of Suffering

This decision came back to bite me once I got to a section that required the music to solve the puzzle. I ran around a relatively small space in total confusion for something like 40 minutes before i figured it out. One of the characters is a musician. It’s not a huge leap to think that would come up at some point! If you enjoy the soundtrack this will be a complete non-issue, of course.

Games with an anti-capitalist message are somewhat rare, especially since so much capitalism is required to make them. I was fascinated by the boldly anti-corporate throughline in Ever After. It’s not exactly nuanced, but your boss is clearly not your friend. The face of the enemy is charming, affable, and generally agreeable, it’s true. But that doesn’t stop you from taking them down. Of course, a lot of enemies don’t stay enemies for long. You need to round out your party roster, after all.

Don’t Let The Man Get You Down

The one downside to an homage like this one is that you’re constantly comparing it to the original games. Most of the time, this wasn’t a detraction, but once in a while, I found myself overwhelmed with Kirkland/Temu vibes. And it wasn’t for any one concrete reason, either. If a game is too familiar, you end up longing for the source material. If nothing else, this shows why it’s so important to balance your influences with your own ideas. Inspiration rather than imitation, you know?

Obviously, any fans of the Paper Mario series will be right at home here. The mechanics and the art style are both familiar enough to draw you in, but it’s the original touches that keep you engaged. I’m fascinated by the anti-capitalist message, even if the soundtrack left me somewhat miserable. Even if you have no allegiance to the game’s inspiration, there’s still something cool to be uncovered. Escape from Ever After is a pretty great RPG in its own right.

***A PS5 code was provided by the publisher***