Everhood: False Endings, Truths, Choices, and Hope

This essay is almost entirely about spoilers for the game Everhood. If this is a game you intend to play, I would recommend doing so before reading this. It’s a pretty neat game, and I would cautiously recommend it, although I find some of its messaging around death and dying, and arguably suicide, confusing at best – and potentially even dangerous.

First, a bit about the game: Everhood is a sort of rhythm adventure game, where you play a living doll named Red trying to recover its stolen arm, meeting a cast of colorful characters (literally: Most of them are named after colors), and eventually confronting the thieving Gold Pig to recover your arm. Along the way, you get in “fights”, which are mostly at first a matter of dodging your opponents attacks, which come out to the beat of the music along a Guitar Hero-esque five-wide lane, until they run out of steam – usually after whatever backing music has run its course. Some of these fights introduce new mechanics, like the story-within-a-story RPG campaign where you reflect certain attacks back with a magic sword, but the core gameplay stays mostly the same. For the first few hours, the experience is quite linear, just funneling you from location to location on your quest to retrieve your arm.

Here’s where significant spoilers start. After your confrontation with Gold Pig, when you recover your arm, a frog NPC (who you first met during the intro where he gave you a tutorial), tells you that everyone in the titular Everhood is immortal, living in an eternal stasis, a sort of prolonged soul death, and that that’s no way to live. He gives another tutorial, this one telling you how to attack and kill opponents, and entrusts you with the task of killing every living thing in Everhood so this torment of immortality can end.

Right away, I’m not on board with this. More NPCs show up to tell me it’s fine, it’s good, I should kill everyone. Whenever I talk to anyone now I have a choice of whether to interact normally or kill them. Most of them are oblivious, saying whatever lines of dialogue they had when I “beat the game” before. A few of them are scared and lock doors, set up traps, and/or run away to keep me from finding them, since they know the basic plot. One character says, essentially, “murdering me is good and you should do it” so in that case I went ahead and murdered them, along with one other character who didn’t seem very cogent but did seem to be in acute suffering and requesting some sort of release. I reasoned that, while it seemed pretty inexcusable to go on a murder spree based on the request of a few strangers, it was reasonable to help out anyone who felt trapped by immortality. I left, and was confronted by a ghost who said my seemingly random meting out of death made no sense.

This was upsetting. I’m told by a few NPCs that, even thought they don’t know it, everyone in this world is suffering, and that it’s my duty to kill them regardless of whether they recognize that suffering or not. How is suffering that isn’t recognized by the being who nominally suffers as suffering still meaningfully suffering? Why is that a justification for disregarding their rights of bodily autonomy and self-determination? Who am I, and also who are these other mysterious figures, to declare that they know better than these people what is good for them? My decision that I would only kill those who come willingly was, it quickly became clear, not allowed for in the game’s design. I looked up the endings: There is a pacifist ending, which I locked myself out of after killing the first NPC who requested death, and a normal ending where you murder everyone, along with a handful of hidden bonus endings. There is no in-between, no option to take those who choose to go before peacefully vacating yourself, no distinction between murder by decree and euthanasia by consent. Some characters agree that their killing is for the best, but only after you’ve made the decision to murder them, so that’s hardly any sort of consent as far as the player is concerned. Of course, many never consent, and die furious, resentful, and confused – the same as most of us, I suppose.

I asked this rhetorically before, but: Literally who am I, what role do I occupy in this story? Some dialogue treats Red as a distinct character within the world, some treats them as an empty vessel for the player to occupy: Which is it? Is it me, the player, who is supposed to be doing the killing? Is it Red? Eventually there’s a very strange plot twist where Red is in fact the vessel for Pink, another spirit who is the one who actually decided to kill every character in the world, whose ambition you worked to carry out. Except Pink is never shown to actually do anything or show any will of their own, so it’s unclear what role they’re actually meant to play in the story. The role is seemingly only to become an avatar of the player at the very end, a vessel (like Red) through which to experience the fear of death, living only to die and to be witnessed in death.

There is clear influence on Everhood’s design from Undertale, which similarly provides the player with a (significantly less explicit) choice of killing or sparing the characters the player encounters, and similarly has ideas of the protagonist harboring a rogue spirit of sorts. It seems that Everhood included some of these elements without carefully considering their implications. Undertale definitively has the main character as an avatar of the player, framing their decisions explicitly as decisions made about how to engage with a complicated world: The possessing spirit only steps in in the most violent case, becoming a dark mirror of the player’s own actions, a malevolent force unleashed by their own malevolence. Undertale also breaks the fourth wall in many other clever ways with sharp intent, and in comparison Everhood’s attempt to play with these ideas seems half-baked, wanting the impact without putting in any of the conceptual groundwork. Purely from the perspective of how violence is handled, Undertale is very responsive to the specifics of the player’s life-and-death decisions, there are many shades in between these extremes of total violence and pure pacifism. Most players, in their first playthrough, will likely end up sparing most NPCs who have significant roles in the story while killing, as a matter of course, most characters fought in random encounters – this is, after all, how we’ve been taught to think about random encounters, as being not real characters. The entire game is structured from the ground up to give these decisions, even the decisions we don’t realize we’re making, meaning and depth – but Everhood isn’t about violence or morality, it’s about letting go and finding something new, and the game would have been much better served by designing around these themes instead of confusedly integrating elements of another design.

This is trying to do so many things at once and doesn’t seem to have a lot of clarity about what each individual design and narrative choice means. It’s not really a story about moral choice, but still has pretenses of offering the player a choice of morality. It’s not really about breaking down the fourth wall and blurring the lines between the fiction and the player’s experience, but still integrates elements which work to do this. In all, it feels that the experience would have been much less frustrating and more cohesive if my character had a strong will and opinion which I worked to carry out, if they were the one who decided to end the world, if my role in this moral conundrum was to merely evaluate how I felt about it rather than be assigned to carry out a morally questionable task with limited perspective or latitude to do anything else and then being blamed by the characters for the structure of the game – even if this blame is temporary and soon forgiven. The question of who’s making these moral choices is quite a relevant one: Pink is a peer of the other characters, and experiences many of the same things, and at least has some grounds for making a decision for the group based on their understanding of the world – but they’re not the one who says it’s okay to take it into your own hands. The ones who tell you murder is okay are weird ethereal ghosts and seemingly inanimate objects, things which are not living, at least in the same sense as the other characters, things which seemingly have nothing to lose.

Who would trust the perspective of the unliving on death? At the end of the game, we are assured that death is not the end, that there are further frontiers, and this is all very reassuring, justifying in retrospect all decisions made up to this point. And once again, I am asked to trust the narrative assurance: It’s fine. Death is not the end – in this fictional universe specifically constructed such that death is defined to not be the end. But the game didn’t ask a character who lived in that universe to make that judgment: It asked me, a human. To me, death is very much the end, as far as I have any reason to believe, and every time I think about it I hear the Modest Mouse lyric: “Well maybe we’ll get lucky and we’ll both live again, well I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know don’t think so.” There are, as well, a number of troubling implications stemming from these incidental decisions: All of the save points talk to you, and you can kill them, but they seemingly don’t have souls, with the same being true of several other entities you kill – so presumably they’re just dead forever, or non-existent forever. Also, one of the spirits, met in the afterlife after the player kills them, regrets being too weak to take matters into their own hands… Which seems to me like a pretty irresponsible idea to put out into the world.

I may be especially sensitive to this narrative because it is, in many ways, extremely similar to that of my long-term-but-currently-on-hiatus project EverEnding (even having a similar title). The premise of my game is specifically that the afterlife has ceased to function: That there was a cycle of reincarnation that is now stalled and broken because all human life perished on Earth so there are no bodies to be reincarnated into. Thus, all the lost souls wandering the increasingly incoherent afterlife must be collected so that they can be reunited and whole – although what happens after that, whether this is an apocalypse or a rebirth, is ambiguous. There is no choice offered between killing and not killing: In EverEnding, this is the only function the character can serve within the space she exists in, and due to her history she is the only suitable person for the task. This character is an incarnation of death – and, potentially, of rebirth. Those she takes with her don’t so much die as change state – in many cases they’ve already had their state changed by the afterlife, lost their mortal shape, become amalgamations of like-minded spirit, mere echoes of whoever they once were. I don’t know whether the moral space presented to the player in my game would be more palatable, or if there are implications of my concept that are even more unpleasant, or symbolism even more confusing – I don’t know whether my sensitivity is just because I’m sad that my game stalled out and this one came to be fully realized. Maybe a bit of all of these.

Perhaps right now I’m simply not very interested in stories about giving up on a world on the assumption that a better one lays nebulously ahead. As far as I know this is what we’ve got, and I’d rather fight for life than death, given a choice.