"I've seen enough weirdos around here"

Everlight of Magic & Power
Game Category: Adventure
Developer / Distributor: Silver Style Entertainment / The Adventure Company
Release Date: 7 Oct 2008
Rating: ESRB - Teens

Introduction
The adventure genre has seen many ups and down in recent years. Most of the time though I have heard generally negative comments about adventure games. There has of course been exceptions. Over the years we have seen superb adventure games such as the Sam and Max series, the Monkey Island series, and the venerable Myst series. Not forgetting the huge number of adventure games coming from development houses such as The Adventure Company and Anuman Interactive.

The usual complaints about adventure games are that the story is either too boring, or the puzzles in the game are unsolvable, or that there is just not enough slapstick humor to tickle your funny bone.

Tonight's game, going by the lengthy title of Everlight of Magic and Power, tries to wow you with its fantastic premise - that of an adolescent wizard-to-be who must help the people of Tallen overcome a curse that turns them into totally different people when night falls.

Adventure abounds in Everlight of Magic and Power

What you get
As is typical of most adventure games, Everlight features a single player only game. Don't expect any multiplayer extravaganza here.

Everlight allows you to select the difficulty level of your choice when you create a new game. You have four choices - hard, medium, easy, and unlimited help. Help for quests is provided through Fiona's Notes and this option is accessed with the F1 key or from the main menu. For certain quests, you have three candles before you, and depending on your choice of difficulty level, you can only burn a limited number of candles. The more candles you decide to burn, the more obvious is the tip given to you to solve the quest. The neat thing is that you can always change your difficulty level if you suddenly feel you needed more help.

Choose your difficulty level

The prologue in Everlight starts off with our protagonist, a teenager by the name of Melvin, running into a candle shop to take refuge from the rain. This is where we meet Mr. Teeth, a buck-toothed man who instead of selling Melvin candles, challenges him to a shell game of "find the flame". As the three cups whizz blazingly fast across the screen and come to a stop, you will soon learn that no matter which you cup you pick, you will always get the right answer. 

As Mr. Teeth puts it so eloquently when you come to the end of the prologue, it's like Melvin is predestined to become a wizard. Soon after, Melvin is teleported to Tallen and the adventure begins.

Watch carefully as I rearrange the cups

The adventure is divided into five huge chapters where you must tackle five types of fears - fear of failure, fear of loneliness, fear of disappointment, fear of being afraid, and fear of death. As you progress further into the game you will realize that Everlight, although humorous and light-hearted at times, is definitely not for young children despite the kiddie like prologue. As they say, looks can be deceiving...

Game Play

The very first thing you notice when you enter Tallen is that there's a cute little pixie-like creature caught in a cage high up on a tree. This feisty little elf is called Fiona and when you rescue her, she becomes your spiritual guide for the rest of the game.

Fiona may be small in stature, but big with hurtful words

Selecting Fiona up in her little cage for the very first time will introduce you to Everlight's conversation system. Essentially a list of conversation choices appear before you and you must select one of them to proceed. Once you have decided, Melvin will speak out this choice verbatim. The non-player characters you interact with will engage Melvin in a typically long but usually entertaining conversations. Do keep your ears peeled since the non-player characters speak without any subtitles (unless you enable the option in the Settings screen).

Take your pick

You have an inventory in the game that shows you all the items you have found in the game. You will be finding all sorts of things in the game and if you are perceptive, you will realize that some of these items can be combined. 

Located at the extreme right of your inventory are two important icons:

• The first represent a compass. Clicking on it will bring you to an overhead map of Tallen, from there it is very easy to backtrack to a location you have been before.
• The next icon, when enabled, is the night and day icon. This is a toggle switch that allows you to take the game into the day mode (where everyone is normal) or into the night mode (when everyone becomes cursed and start acting weirdly). This is an incredibly handy switch that you will continually need to use as you try to solve the mystery of the curse of Tallen.

The Inventory System

In case you are afraid of pixel hunting - a chore that is prevalent in many other adventure games, you should be happy to know that Everlight has a handy help system that you can call at any time in the game:

• Hitting the H key will show all objects and characters you can interact with.
• Hitting the G key only shows all objects you can interact with.
• Hitting the E key shows all exits leading from an area.

This is truly a handy feature, and the developers must be praised for implementing such a system.

Wow... there's so many things to interact with

Graphics

The graphics in Everlight is generally well drawn, with some areas having more detail than others. I like the overhead map as well which allows you a quick way to visit the many areas in the game. The scenes at each location is also drawn in two modes - one that done in daytime, and one for the night - a lot of thought went into their creation and the artistic direction is rather reminiscent of old school adventure gaming style.

The characters are all realistic looking with different facial features and clothes. Our protagonist Melvin simply reminds me of Daniel Radcliffe (minus the pimples). In fact Melvin's uncanny resemblance to Daniel sometimes makes me wonder if Everlight was designed to be a spoof of Harry Potter.

The town of Tallen from overhead

Audio

The voice work is the true star of Everlight. The actors and actresses do a great job in their roles. There are of course a couple of rough spots where the acting wasn't too spectacular, but these were far and few between. The music is also commendable for being light-hearted and fun to listen to, but I must add that there seems to be some Germanic influence to the music. The ambient sounds were in my opinion average for this style of adventure game.

This moment in the game was designed to torture your ears

Pros:

• The tiered Help System provided through Fiona's Notes is a novel idea.
• Next would be the great idea of reducing the need to pixel hunt by helping to highlight to the player all objects, characters, and exits.
• The voice work and music is lavishly done and worth listening to.

Fiona is one helpful elf

Cons:

• The story tries to be funny at times, but it sometimes feels like either something was lost in the translation or I am just too dense to understand the cheap slapstick humor being portrayed. Well, in those cases, I just hold my head up high, scratch my nose, and continue on with playing the game.
• Some of the puzzles unfortunately tend to have strange and obscure solutions, so you will definitely need to refer to Fiona's Notes for some help.
• There are a couple of times when a scene takes a bit longer to load. This is a minor annoyance considering the light-hearted fun you will get from the game.
• The game appears to be aimed at kids, but don't be mistaken... this game has an ESRB of T for drug reference, language, sexual themes, and violent references. This is evidenced by that oh so famous scene of the old grandmother acting out her fantasies of being a dominatrix by night. Chuckle!

Weapons of mass destruction - not meant for kids!

Conclusion

To sum it all up, I found Everlight of Magic & Power to be quite an entertaining adventure game. It's definitely not one of the best out there, but if you don't mind listening to lots of game script that is acted out quite decently, then this game is the game for you.

Don't be fooled by the Dominatrix though! She's guilty like the others.

Daily PC Game Review Score: 7 / 10
Review Date: 26 Apr 2011