Extreme Evolution: Drive to Divinity

a true game for sickos and the most exciting 3d platformer i've played in a very long time

I acknowledge that this is not a game for everyone, but aside from having one of the hardest names of any game I've ever heard of, [i]Extreme Evolution: Drive to Divinity[/i] has instilled in me a fundamental shift in my psychology and I now doubt I'll ever look at any other collect-a-thon platformer or self-proclaimed "surrealist" game quite the same way again. The presentation is spiritually provocative, its overwhelming maximalism and often garish visuals fusing with the intensely beautiful yet deeply unsettling soundtrack to coalesce with your possibly chronological but certainly never linear explorations of the cosmically extrinsic 'sites' within. Swapping between your constantly growing collection of 'forms' as you navigate these ethereal environments, chaining each one's unique movements and characteristics together strength-by-strength to make your way through this kaliedoscopic interpretation of some metaphysical plane where any line between the scientific and the divine has long since washed away under the waves of an unknowable imperceptible energy, it feels like performing a well-rehearsed dance across the four-hundredth dimension or skipping a stone over the event horizon of the heat death of the universe. I've played other pretty far-out games, but none of them have been so profoundly removed from anything I know about being a human being on planet Earth, nor have they dared to fundamentally challenge the authority of my consciousness so intensely, let alone by using a string section trapped in a stunning crescendo while an unknown bodiless spectator hides in the noise, breathing down my neck as I gaze upon a distant Earth, her clouds adorned with a single number of clear significance but devoid of context. The real miracle here is that despite this, it's never hard to figure out how to progress or which way to go. The game explains very little, opting instead to give you the tools, lay out the challenge, and let you feel your way through what I can barely begin to "conclude" with any real confidence could be a portrayal of either the primal fear of some biblical event or the aftermath of an unfathomable apocalypse on a horrifying scale. In that sense this is a masterclass in level design: employing such abstract spaces on a transcendental basis to create a playable environment of impossible geometry that's [i]this[/i] intuitively navigable is a genuine feat and I am in awe. Having so brazenly glazed Extreme Evolution so far, I need to note that it's not perfect. The UI is plain at best, and a bit disjointed from the rest of the presentation at worst. While on the subject, [i]some[/i] of the visual effects are particularly hard on the eyes, though it does succeed in making me feel that I'm looking into a scene so removed from our biological reality that my brain simply cannot comprehend it, instead filling the gaps with noise and gutturally screeching with panic. Some of the sound effects feel like placeholders and they do stick out a bit. And while I am a huge fan of the non-linear approach to, well, [i]everything[/i] in Extreme Evolution, I can't help but feel that maybe even the smallest [i]tinge[/i] of direction - not for yellow-paint accessibility but just for a slightly more cohesive entry point into this rabbit hole of a game - would bump it up from a solid 9 to an instant 10; in short, I fear Extreme Evolution is a bit of a hard sell since it does appear for a cursory glance at the surface to resemble a student's Unity engine physics experiement sandbox with a broken shader pipeline and some major scope creep... though the game refers to itself as an experiment on multiple occasions, seemingly both in a literal meaning but also within the purview of however you might try, fruitlessly, to summarise the setting or events of this game. The metas have metas. My mind has melted. And [i]that[/i] is why I'm personally none too put off by these minor gripes: should you give it a chance it soon enough proves its worth. Having now mentioned numbers it does feel almost unfair to try and give Extreme Evolution a score, or to even call it a game in the first place... not wishing to suggest that the connotations of the word "game" are somehow inapplicable here. But within very little playtime I suddenly noticed that without realising, I was no longer looking at the game nor controlling and reacting to it, but in a profusely sacred and intimately personal way I was [i]feeling[/i] it. I was inside the egg, and then I birthed a perfect sphere in its place, and then I grew legs and became the spider, and as I hung from what felt like the ceiling I prayed for the path to open, and when I lost my grip and fell towards an abyss so deep that it almost blinded me I panicked and I sinned, and before I could find myself hanging in the balance on my faith I had unwittingly stolen another body from behind an impenetrable wall, and the whole time it was like moving a limb. I've sat here for ages trying to work out how to describe the sensation but I'm coming up empty. It invoked in me emotions that I simply do not know the words for, if such words even exist. There's fourth wall breaks, and then there's [i]Extreme Evolution: Drive to Divinity[/i], which breaks the fourth wall, and the first through third walls, and any other metaphorical wall known to us mere mortals or otherwise - not in disparaging immersion, but as means to go beyond it and haul you straight in. I'm going to be thinking about this one for a long time.

it's extreme evolution: drive to divinity

This is an incredibly important game and one which I wish the broader game design industry would study. It's an excellent argument for "Games as Art". It deconstructs a lot of baseline assumptions about structure, level design, progression, player freedom, etc. Although the game's visual style may be off-putting to a newcomer, it is impressively legible. No matter how crazy and psychedelic the visuals get, it's always clear where the player is oriented in space and what is happening around them. This is an insane triumph of game design, I cannot even imagine how the developer successfully "whiteboarded" this game. How do you go from having some of these ideas in your head to implementing them in this way? Cruelty Squad definitely opened the door for games like this one, but Extreme Evolution does significantly more with some of Cruelty Squad's norm-challenging ideas. I am not being hyperbolic when I say I think this is one of the most important games of all time. It's hard to classify genre-wise -- I guess it's a Psychedelic Buddhist Metroidvania ImmSim Breath-of-the-Wild-Progression Abstract Platformer? However you'd classify it, it is a mindblowing game and worth playing to 100% completion.

this game is EXACTLY what it's like to have one of my ocular migraines

there's a promise i feel a developer making to me when they describe their game as an expressive platformer, and extreme evolution fulfills that more than any other game i've played. the breadth of the frequently-but-never-totally overlapping movement options combined with the open exploration and easy revisiting of previous areas results in the player defining a unique movement set entirely by their own preferences. even the controls are just barely prescribed; you'll be encouraged and then forced to remap everything as you gain more forms than buttons. many of the environments feel less designed than discovered; as if they fell from space, or you did, and you coincidentally have just the 6 little tricks needed to make your way all around them. it is a game made up of all of the areas in other platformers that you could technically get to but weren't supposed to. you will, and are expected to, learn how to displace yourself through walls. the visual styling ranges from kind of a mess to genuinely striking depending on the area and your tastes. it's an obvious draw, and if you didn't close the store page immediately after seeing it and are here reading reviews, it's probably for you. adapting to making sense of it felt quick and natural, and i was regularly taking breaks just to look around and appreciate it. there are shapes in here i remember from abstract nightmares i had as a child. i didn't expect to 100% this going in, but i found myself wanting to stay in the world. give it a shot--there isn't much else like this.

Do you like rolling weird objects around a psychedelic landscape with good semi-ambient music? Then buy this. It's kind of like Super Monkey Ball but extremely weird. I collected "self" and it did nothing.

my eyes hurt and my dream last night was full of the weirdest psychadelic visuals and broken graphics ive ever had 14.59483/10 would recommend to both friends and enemies

I had a lot of fun using the different forms to break the game and 100% levels in one button. Also, the music is really good and the visuals --while at first overwhelming-- grew on me and were very pretty sometimes.