Escape From Everwood (by Stuart Fernandez-Mahoney) is perhaps the very first gamebook we have ever featured on Edamame Reviews – and boy is it cool!
Is it a Book? or a Game? 🤔
If you’ve never had the prestige of “playing” a gamebook the process is a little something like this…
Starting at page 1, you read until your character is given a choice in the story – at which point you turn to say page 133 to turn left or page 220 to turn right. Essentially giving you a choice as to how your character moves and reacts to his/her surroundings. 😆
Our gameplay video 👇
Although the concept is really quite cool, it is 2019 (almost 2020) and we now have RPG’s where you can not only choose what to do, you can actually participate in epic boss battles first hand.
Thankfully, Escape From Everwood is no ordinary gamebook.
The stories in this book are procedurally generated, meaning each and every adventure you play through is uniquely generated before the game begins, for a truly original gameplay experience!
Do the math… 😅
You (nor anyone else for that manner) may ever be faced with the same story again… ever!
Although we do not know exactly how many potential stories Escape From Everwood has, are if you remember studying about powers in math class, I’m sure you realize that there are obviously a lot… 😂
As gamers who play way too many games each day for work, one cool thing we noticed was how unpredictable the procedurally generated stories are. We can generally guess what is and isn’t a good decision in a story that has been carefully planned out but in Escape From Everwood, everything is random, making the game feel more like an actual adventure.
Can’t scroll…? 😭
Much as we love this game, we do have a few complaints with the user interface. Overall, the visuals use a lot of elements from default iOS which doesn’t exactly give the game a very premium feel.
Also, when trying to scroll through longer sections of text, we often ended up moving the actual application frame(?) instead of just the text in the middle of the screen. It would be great to see improvements in these two areas in the future.
Other than that, Escape From Everwood is a great little game/book we had a lot of fun playing!
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Find it on App Store