Extreme Evolution: Drive to Divinity
by Sam Atlas
Finished: ✓Sam Atlas has turned the concept of strobing and flashing visual effects into a game. Any image or video that you see of it cannot fully convey how the game looks. This is because the game's visuals flash and shift so much in a way that a still image and bitrate limits are not equipped to handle.
The game describes its visuals as "unpredictable", which is an understatement. The concepts of texture and physical material fade away in exchange for an abstract, nebulous environment. Even discerning the most basic of visual information is a challenge; Objects of varying distances blend together in your view because of the lack of clear silhouette, texture, shape, or form, much like an optical illusion. You may not know that you're moving towards a wall until you hit it. Who really knows where one object ends and another begins?
Weirdly enough, if your eyes aren't immediately strained by the effects, you can kind of get used to the visuals, and actually understand what you're looking at. You learn to rely on parallax in order to tell objects apart; By constantly being on the move and looking in different directions, you can figure out where objects are based on how they move in your view. Like tuning out noise to find a signal, you can reach beyond the flashy visuals and see the environment that you're in. It made me feel like I was playing a game for the first time. I had to look at the flashing lights and colors until I could learn how to associate them with objects, walls, and floors.
The writing is strange and half-sensical. It was a joy to open up the pause menu and not immediately understand every option. As you explore, you are accompanied by a variety of strange, droning, very loud songs. It's awesome.
In the game, you explore various levels in this weird environment. Each level is connected to others through portals, so you have to explore around in order to find different levels. As you explore, you find many different forms to transform into. Some forms are more useful than others, but all of them have different stats like weight, speed, traction, air control, utility, pagentry, style, and divinity (you know, all pretty normal stuff).
You start off as a humble "Egg" which is an oval shaped form that you roll around with. You can unlock things like "Auto" which is a car that can go very fast but cannot turn. Similar to "Auto", you can become "Cor" which is a car that faces based on the camera direction, but there's also "Car" which is a normal car. Don't forget "Caar" which is like "Car" but bigger and plays a truck horn when you transform into it.
There's also "Boll" which is a ball that you can roll around, but there's also "Ball" which is an upgrade because it has higher traction, allowing you to roll up very steep slopes, but sometimes, you want to use "Bomp" because it's very bouncy, so you can often gain insane vertical height with it.
You can become "Stop" which completely makes you unable to move (actually useful because some forms can make you go exceedingly fast). You can become "Pray" which you can't move with, but will make certain special things happen. Maybe you want to become "Chair" which places down a chair that creates a portal to The Chair Factory. You can become "Fake" which is described as "the manmade human" in the game, or you can become "Bake" (description: "big fake, baked human"). You can even become "Jake" ("the jumbo fake")
This all sounds completely insane, but most of the forms have some weird niche application which you can add to your toolkit. "Polyp" turns you into multiple small balls that can all roll around individually, but the "center" of your body is the middle of all of those balls, so you can actually clip through objects by using "Polyp" to surround an object (which places your center inside of that object) and then transforming into something else which will teleport you inside of that object. "Fake" is not physically simulated, unlike many other forms, which means that you can move with high precision and easily move other physics objects out of the way. "Chunk" turns you into an incredibly heavy cube, which can also be used to move heavy objects, though you can't move during it.
Ten buttons in the game (most buttons on a controller) are dedicated to shortcuts, and you can bind any of the forms to those buttons for quick access. Learning to use different forms in situations is the key to navigation in the game. As you play, you eventually assemble a lineup of forms that you like to use the most. It is quite an expressive platformer.
I had no idea to expect with this game, but I was very delighted by it, and it didn't even strain my eyes too much.