HomeFeaturesEverdeep Aurora
Everdeep Aurora is Hollow Knight for people who love Game Boys and are weary of combatI can dig it
I can dig it
Image credit:Ysbryd Games
Image credit:Ysbryd Games
Everdeep Aurora - Announcement TrailerWatch on YouTube
Everdeep Aurora - Announcement Trailer
There’s a guy with the head of a shark, a tetchy underground gardener who scolds you for stepping on the flowers, a bull-headed blacksmith, and your friend the frog, who is embarked on their own parallel downward journey. Doors and holes in the backdrop warp you across the world map down the righthand side; some provide access to dwellings and side dungeons with chests to uncover.
As per the ‘Hollow Knightbut wholesome’ premise, none of the characters are your enemies and there are no nameless bats, slimes or the like to butcher outside the setpiece areas. The challenge so far consists simply of keeping your drill fuelled – some rocks harbour red energy gems, and there are big energy pumps at intervals – while mapping the setting so as to find objects other people are looking for.
Image credit:Ysbryd Games
It’s a kind of subterranean, vertical village, with an inventory bag down the lefthand side that soon fills up with stray belongings and key-type items bearing pithy single-sentence descriptions. Everything is gently played for laughs, as with the more knowing species of Zelda villager dialogue: a fishing rod is summarised as “a device that can be used to extract objects from water without getting wet”, and one chamber (pictured above) is a homage to Castlevania.
Deeper down, there’s the promise of minigames - rolling dice, claw machines, and the like – together with more robust platforming challenges involving trapdoors and wall-jumps. I’m not expecting Everdeep Aurora to be an intricate game, but it’s more than a slice of very cool aesthetics. It’s a game that takes away the peril of videogame dungeons in order to rediscover their enchantment, and make a few unlikely friends in passing. When I play the full thing - there’s no release date yet - I’m hoping I’ll be able to return to the surface with some key artefact or other and win over the occupant of that Bloodborne house.
