Everdeep Aurora is a 2D platformer that delivers a nostalgic adventure in a crumbling world full of mystery and lovable, quirky characters. Its Game Boy aesthetic brings plenty of joy to the table, with copious levels of charm, but it offers very little guidance for the player. Quite often I was left feeling frustrated — and its ending is wobbly at best.
The Story of Everdeep Aurora
The story of Everdeep Aurora follows Shell the kitten, who awakens to find her mother gone, and a meteor shower raining down around her. With the help of Ribbert the frog, Remulus the ram and the other denizens of the underground, Shell explores the depths of the Everdeep to reunite with her lost mother.
Along your journey you’ll meet a cast of colourful characters, many of which need your help in one way or another. Ribbert, for instance, is also searching for a missing loved one.
The deeper you drill into the depths of the Everdeep, the deeper Shell gets caught up in a larger mystery, and the mission of finding her mother becomes a bit of an after thought. The game veers away from the simple story of reuniting with a loved one in a crumbling world, moving forward with a grand conspiracy and the fate of Everdeep in your hands; the story felt forced and underdeveloped, detracting from the heart of the tale.
I’m not sure how many endings there are in the game — I experienced three of them — but none were satisfying conclusions to the game. This created more questions answers.
Maybe I haven’t experienced the ‘true’ ending just yet… Though, when you have multiple endings to your game, each one needs to feel as good as the others as it might be the only ending the player ever sees.
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Exploring the Everdeep
Everdeep Aurora is presented in gorgeous pixel-art, with retro sound design and a restricted colour palette, reminiscent of the 16-bit Game Boy Color games of my childhood.
As you explore, you dig down through the ground with your drill, unearthing new areas to explore, characters to help, and treasures to collect. Most creatures need specific items before they will help you, so a lot of the game is spent fetching the right objects to unlock a little more story. There’s also some light platforming and puzzle solving sections to keep things interesting.
The drill can be upgraded by the blacksmith if you bring him the right materials, though, even after multiple upgrades, my drill never got to the ‘hot-knife-through-butter’ stage that I was hoping for. The slow path-cutting can get tedious when you’re trying to get somewhere quickly.
With its post-apocalyptic setting, anthropomorphic animal characters and drill-exploration mechanic, the game feels like a pleasant mix of Hollow Knight and SteamWorld Dig.
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Bugs In The Dirt
My biggest gripe with the game is its lack of direction and explanation. While it’s initially liberating to just explore and figure things out on your own, the pointy end of the game lack’s guidance, which can get frustrating. On multiple occasions I didn’t have a clue where to go, and just had to painstakingly explore the map over and over, from top to bottom, until I found what I had missed.
Strangely there’s no option to have multiple save files, or even the ability to delete a save file and start the game from the beginning. This meant there’s no way to replay the game until it gets patched, which is a pretty big oversight. There’s also no auto-save function, so you’ll need to manually save at campsites or risk losing all your progress… Something I found out the hard way.
I also experienced a persistent bug where almost every chest I opened gave me crystals, non-stop, until I moved away from it. SO many would pour out that my game would chug and be reduced to a few frames per second, only normalising once the crystals had disappeared. While I never lacked for crystals to power up my drill, it did make that aspect of the game too easy, and it wasn’t something I could avoid.
Should you buy Everdeep Aurora?
Everdeep Aurora capitalises on the nostalgia for Game Boy Color era aesthetics delivering a whimsical journey that had every sentimental bone in my body tingling. While it doesn’t quite stick the landing, I still enjoyed the majority of my time with the game.
All in all, it’s a pretty good debut from two-person indie developers Nautilus Games. I’ll be there day one if they decide to make an Everdeep Aurora 2.
Quest Daily scores Everdeep Aurora:
7/10
Everdeep Aurora tunnels onto PC and Nintendo Switch on July 11th.
Access to Everdeep Aurora was supplied to Quest Daily for the purpose of this review.
