EVO: Search for Eden

 

When I think about the games in the SNES library that the lame retro game fans on Twitter like to talk about, E.V.O isn't one that gets talked about all that often.  That's not to say it's completely forgotten, when it does get mentioned people do usually like to chime in with an "oh yeah, that game is awesome!" but unlike your Final Fantasies, Chrono Triggers and Marios, E.V.O isn't brought up all that much.

The story is simple, you play as a small creature and you must evolve your way through various time periods to reach Eden and become Gaia's right hand man.  Eat your way through a bunch of fish, dinos, mammals and birds and get to her to win.  It's a simple premise but the plot is sort of secondary here, we're not here for story time, we're here to eat some smaller, weaker animals.

The game starts you off as a fish and you must bite a few creatures nearby to kill them and gain Evo Points. Once you have enough Evo Points you can open a menu that has a pretty high number of options (later on at least) and you must evolve your creature to bring up its stats so you can kill and eat more things to evolve even further.  As you do this, you'll eventually reach a boss and upon killing the boss you'll be teleported to the next age where you'll do it all over again but as a different animal instead.  Later on in the game it's possible to evolve in specific ways to get specific creatures but I never worked this out.  For example I know for a fact you can become a human at some point but I ended up finishing the game as a weird horse-lizard thing with massive fangs.

The game has a fair bit of jank to it though, with stiff controls and pretty awful jumping even with all the upgrades to make your jumps better but the game is so pathetically easy overall that it doesn't really feel like much of a problem.  Some of the bosses can be a bit annoying but doing an evolution fully restores your HP and there's usually an option that costs basically nothing so once you work this out dying is ALMOST impossible.

The other irritating thing is that whenever you enter a new age and become a new animal, your stats are decreased into oblivion so while in the previous section you had massive teeth and a billion HP, once that area is over your back to being a small rat with 5hp that does no damage to anything.  This means that you have to do some annoying grinding which brings down the pace of the game but once you get going again the fun comes back pretty quickly.

So despite its pretty glaring flaws E.V.O is a really good game that's very much worth checking out.  I don't think it's been released on anything so you may have to get dodgy about it but in my opinion, it's worth the effort.