Escape From Ever After review – Paper Mario goes indie

With no sign of a new Paper Mario game from Nintendo, a new indie game attempts to fill the gap with a parody of fairytales and corporate culture.

The Paper Mario franchise may be Nintendo’s most underrated property. Its compelling turn-based combat, mordant dialogue, and fourth wall breaking commentary on everything from the mores of video games to current affairs remain almost unique. That was made particularly apparent by the release of the remake of Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door in 2024, which remains one of the best things Nintendo has ever done and one of the funniest video games ever made.

Although 2020’s Paper Mario: The Origami King is the best new entry in over a decade, the series is still nowhere near the peak of The Thousand-Year Door, thereby leaving the door open for indie developers to create their own takes on the formula. And so it is that Escape From Ever After has similar two-dimensional protagonists, familiar rhythm action-meets-turn based battles, a witty script, and a penchant for gaming and cultural references.

It shows remarkably good taste, even if taking cues from Nintendo, perhaps the world’s most accomplished game developer, is a risky enterprise because of the inevitable comparisons it invites.

Starting with its own made-up fairytale, the heroic Flynt Buckler heads into battle against his nemesis, Tinder the Dragon. When he arrives at Tinder’s castle it’s obvious something’s not right – instead of his fire-breathing arch enemy, he discovers the corporate headquarters of Ever After Inc., who’ve annexed the castle and turned it into offices for their executives, accounting, and HR departments.

Tinder himself is skulking in the dungeons and is no longer the fearsome beast he once was, thanks to Ever After’s restraining collar that makes him small and mostly harmless. Despite their antipathy, he and Flynt reluctantly team up in an attempt to take on the soul-sucking corporate. The only way they can find to do that is by taking jobs as interns in the hope of somehow dismantling it from the inside.

It turns out Ever After’s business model is taking over the fairytale worlds of storybooks, asset stripping them, and forcing their characters either into destitution or into employment with the company. Walking around their offices, you’ll find mermaids, robots, unicorns, fairies, and a host of desk bound mythical beasts, along with familiar main characters. One of your first battles is against the thieving Three Blind Mice, who have all miraculously regained their eyesight.

The technology that enables these takeovers is a contraption that transports you to and from the realms of any book you find in the library. Your first port of call is the world of The Three Little Pigs, who’ve embraced their new corporate overlords and are busy constructing a block of luxury flats in a building site secured by a gatehouse built of straw. Having learnt from their mistakes, it’s been comprehensively wind and fireproofed, rendering Tinder’s efforts to torch it ineffectual.

In this version of the tale, the Big Bad Wolf is a freewheeling musician. He and his fellow wolves live peacefully in their village and are charmingly naive about the intentions of the pigs, who plan to bulldoze it and use the land to extend their development. While all that could easily come off as obtusely obvious social commentary, thanks to a funny and well written script, it manages to feel light-hearted and amusing.

The puzzles are just as well constructed. Each takes place in a limited area, which despite the game’s simple art style also manages to conceal secrets. All can be revealed by combing the props you find with the skills of your party, which comprises two characters at time, although you can swamp them out whenever you like, in or out of battles.

That means you can get Tinder to light a torch before throwing Flynt’s shield through it to ignite an otherwise unreachable bomb flower to destroy an obstacle. Or you could use the Wolf’s wind power to extinguish the fire. As your party grows, you’re given time to get you used to characters’ abilities and the various ways they work together, in puzzles that are pleasantly head-scratching without ever feeling particularly cryptic.

In case you’re concerned by the childlike graphical style and opening quest set in a nursery fable, the next mission is set in a parody of H. P. Lovecraft’s The Shadow Over Innsmouth, populated by forbiddingly hostile seagulls who shun your party, calling you ‘Outsider’. Being told to ‘Embrace the void’ by an angry looking talking bird is genuinely just the kind of thing we look for in a game.

The solid puzzles, highly amusing script and situations, acerbic observations on corporate work culture, and endless volley of cultural references are hugely enjoyable, even if it makes almost no use of its characters’ 2D nature. The platforming sections are also compromised by the fixed, front-on camera view. But the game’s biggest problem is the combat.

Like the early, role-playing versions of Paper Mario, battles are turn-based, augmented by carefully timed rhythm action style button presses to block and perform attacks. While the latter work predictably, attempting to parry requires a degree of precision that is unnecessarily frustrating.

Each enemy has their own timing, along with at least two different attacks to learn. In some cases that’s fine, but in others their tells prove almost impossible to read, either with infinitesimal wind-ups, or animations that just aren’t clear enough to time your block. Bosses frequently strike several times, forcing you to parry repeatedly, but they use those attacks inconsistently. Since the game prevents you from button-mashing, these moments can feel dispiritingly unfair.

It’s a sense exacerbated by lengthy boss battles that force you to spend numerous action phases consuming items to top up magic and hit points, or dismantling otherwise impenetrable enemy defences, most of which regenerate after a round or two. Combined with the unpredictable attack patterns, these fights feel interminable. There is an auto-block you can toggle in settings, but doing so makes battles drearily straightforward.

With fights being both frequent and wholly responsible for the experience points that let you level up, it’s a pervasive issue, and makes the Stairs of Success, Escape From Ever After’s 100-storey battle arena, something best avoided. We managed 10 levels, with little stomach for more despite the XP, coins and ability-conferring trinkets on offer.

It’s a pity, the rest of the experience works pretty well. Plenty of games have good puzzles, but perfectly pitched dark humour is a vanishing rarity, let alone with conversations and plot exposition that’s neither too brief nor excessively verbose. There’s pleasure to be had with Escape From Ever After, but when battles accounts for so much of its play time you can’t help but miss Nintendo’s obsessive level of refinement.

Formats: PlayStation 5 (reviewed), PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, Xbox Series X/S, and PC
Price: £19.99
Publisher: HypeTrain Digital
Developer: Sleepy Castle Studio and Wing-It! Creative
Release Date: 23rd January 2025
Age Rating: 3

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