Escape From Ever After Review: So Paper Mario It Hurts

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. I love Paper Mario. If my nearly hour-long review of Paper Mario and the Thousand Year Door didn’t give that away then I don’t know what will. I adore this quirky little RPG series. Well, the first two anyway. The rest of the series is admittedly a mixed bag, although I will say only two of the games are outright bad. Origami King and Super are both decent for what they are.

Naturally, being the big fan that I am, I have also played games based on the Paper Mario series. Mainly from the indie scene. Because if there’s one thing Indie developers love its taking gameplay concepts developers are doing jack all with and doing something with it themselves. Especially if it’s a Nintendo game, but ESPECIALLY if it’s a Nintendo RPG. I’m pretty sure Earthbound should be a name for an entire genre at this point.

There aren’t as many Paper Mario styled games out there, but there are a few, and two in particular have caught my eye. The first was Bug Fables which I actually did a full review on. I remember liking it as a fun take on the Paper Mario formula with a great story, but it also suffered from some egregious pacing issues that have prevented me from going back to it.

Then there was Born of Bread which, to be honest, I didn’t play much of. It had the look and charm of Paper Mario down from what I played, but man did it not play well. It was rough. You can tell the developers hearts were in the right place, but they lacked the technical skill to pull it off.

So much like the Paper Mario series itself, the clones are a mixed bag. But now we have another contender for the Paper Mario inspired indie RPG crown in Escape From Ever After. A game I remember hearing about a while ago and yet I was still surprised when it came out. I hadn’t heard much about it since it’s initial announcement. But I’m a simple man; I see a Paper Mario like I play the Paper Mario like.

It wasn’t just the Paper Mario inspirations that drew me in. It was also the premise. The idea of these fairy-tale worlds being overtaken by a massive corporation sounded intriguing. As an avid lover of folk tales, and an avid hater of conglomerating corporate cuckolds, it seemed like a game that would be right up my alley.

Which it was. Escape From Ever After is a damn good game. Of all the Paper Mario copy-cats I’ve played it’s easily the best one. It captures the style, spirit, tone, gameplay, writing style and charm of Thousand Year Door so well it’s borderline uncanny. Perhaps though it does its job a little too well.

I already gave you the basic idea of the premise but let’s get into more detail. The game begins with a storybook about a fairy-tale hero named Flynt Buckler and his battles with an evil dragon named Tinder. The two are arch-nemeses and one day Flynt heads to Tinder’s castle in another attempt to take her down.

But on arriving he discovers the castle has been taking over by a mega corporation called Ever After Inc. A company from the real world that’s invented technology to let them enter the worlds of storybooks and uses that to exploit them for resources and cheap labour. Because what else is a giant mega-corp going to do with that technology.

Now they’ve set up a new branch in Flynt’s story and are using the castle as their base of operations. Using their technology to shrink Tinder down and locking her in her own dungeon. They do the same to Flynt when he refuses to join them, and the two enemies agree to work together to escape. It soon becomes apparent to them though that the only way to put things right is to join the company. That way they can try to take it down from within by sabotaging their operations and hopefully find a way to sever their connections to the storybook worlds.

They do just that and along the way they recruit other characters to help them on their quest. They meet Wolfgang the big bad wolf, Eve the skeleton witch who works in Ever After’s HR department and Patches the punk teddy bear. They’ll also run into other characters working with the company that are all based on classic literary characters like Sherlock Holmes, Mother Goose, Dracula and others.

There is a lot you can do with this premise. The most obvious one is the critique on corporate culture and the encroaching overbearance of mega corporations. Which the game does indeed tackle. I was initially worried about this since, while I do agree with the message that corporations are huge wastes of space that make the world worse, it’s very easy to deliver that message in a way that comes across as preachy and full of itself. Like you can tell the writers think they’re being so clever by doing it. Despite it being something people have droned on about for decades.

But Escape From Ever After never came across that way. For one it knows exactly what it is. This is a goofy comedy adventure story that focuses more on the characters and the wacky situations they find themselves in rather than the social commentary. Really if you break it down the corporation are no different than a typical evil empire you see in a bunch of other fantasy stories. It just uses corporations to make it feel more modern.

But more importantly, there’s actual depth to the message. While the corporation is portrayed as evil, not everyone who works for them is. There are some in the company that know what they’re doing is wrong but still think in the end that what they’re doing is the right thing. The guy they set up as the main villain is actually one of the most sympathetic characters in the game because you can completely believe why he does what he does.

They even do something I never thought I’d see, actually show why people would choose to work for them. Because the people who work for these mega-corps aren’t doing so because they’re evil or because they’re forced to. Some of them are, but not everyone. Most are doing it because they think it’s the best thing for them. That is what is sold to them by the corporations.

Eve joined the company because she was the villain of her own story, and she wanted to have a fresh start to become more than that. That’s why a lot of people joined it. They wanted to be free of the shackles of their fictional existence and gain more of their own identity outside of what was written on the page. Much like how people in the real world join big companies under the pretence of turning their life around only to become another cog in the machine. They’re not viewed as evil or even misguided but just people trying to become more than what they are.

How is it that this Paper Mario clone has a deeper, more nuanced take on evil corporations than the multi-billion-dollar Avatar franchise. The funny thing is that isn’t even what Escape From Ever After is about. The anti-corporate message is just the window dressing. What the game actually focuses on more is existentialism.

No I’m dead serious. The game is actually far more interested in the nature of stories, the deeper meanings they hold and the nature of existence of fictional characters and worlds than it is about corporate social satire. It doesn’t get meta, but it definitely gets a lot deeper than I was expecting it to without getting too up its own ass.

Instead of getting overly pretentious and philosophical it instead just posits an idea and lets the audience ruminate on it themselves. Allowing them to come to their own conclusions. Which it does by simply having the characters speak to each other in a way that makes sense for these characters to do. The writing is so much better than I could have expected. It actually made me stop and think about what I was seeing.

And it does all of this while still being a goofy comedy. Despite how depressing the story gets and trust me it has moments that will leave you in tears, it is always consistently funny. The writing is charming with a great sense of wit, and the characters are all likable and work off each other very well. In fact, one thing I’ll give this over Paper Mario is there’s more interactions between the party members. You really get to know them a lot more, and they do develop a genuine and very believable friendship by the end.

It also plays into and parodies a lot of storybook clichés. The two main heroes are both a take on the classic hero vs dragon archetype, and while subverting that trope is nothing new, I do like the antagonistic frenemyship they develop. Flynt is a bit of a stock hero, but that’s also the point. He’s meant to be a stereotype and that does play into the plot. So it actually works for him to be kind of boring.

Even a lot of the worlds you run into are parodies/takes on classic literary stories. There’s one based on the Three Little Pigs where the pigs are real estate moguls trying to gentrify a village of wolves. I’ll admit I’ve seen this role reversal before, where the pigs are the villains and the wolf the hero. but the way they handle it here is very funny. They even take on adventure stories, sci-fi and even mix detective stories with Lovecraftian horror. It gets bonkers.

Like Thousand Year Door there’s a clear love of stories expressed here. Does it all work? No, some of the parodies are stuff I’ve seen before, and some of the jokes just don’t land, but overall I’d say the writing is incredibly strong. Managing to be funny while also grappling with a lot of different themes and ideas. It can be a bit cluttered in that regard, but it manages to handle it all well thanks to strong pacing and great character writing.

I’d love to go into more detail on the story because it does get incredibly interesting but considering how new the game is I don’t want to spoil too much. One other issue it has is that most of the interesting stuff is in the game’s second half. The first half is still very entertaining, but the second half is when you get to all the deeper ideas.

In short, it takes a bit for it to get fully going. Thankfully it doesn’t have the same pacing issues Bug Fables has. It doesn’t have as many lulls in the story and the side-quests are fewer and feel more impactful. It isn’t nearly as slow as that game was.

All I’ll say is that the writing is very strong. Honestly in some ways it’s stronger than Thousand Year Doors. It certainly has deeper concepts. But I still think Thousand Year Door’s writing is slightly better. For one that game gave a little more backstory to the world. There was a mystery to it and side stories you could uncover that really helped flesh it out.

Even the NPC’s that weren’t part of the main story had their own little mini-plots going on. It was a game that made you want to talk to everyone again to see what they were up to. Escape From Ever After doesn’t quite reach that level. The NPC’s can certainly be entertaining; a lot of the coworkers are takes on office stereotypes like Mother Goose being the office Karen or Pinocchio being the loser trying to act cool.

I did get a chuckle out of a lot of them, but unless there’s a side quest involving them, they don’t get much development. There isn’t an equivalent to the broken family that comes together in Thousand Year Door or Luigi and his self-aggrandising take on his adventures. After a while I stopped talking to the NPC’s since they didn’t have anything new to say. Which is normal for RPG’s I know, but this is aping Thousand Year Door which gave NPC’s more to say. I have a bigger expectation because of that.

I also think Thousand Year Door handled it’s more heartfelt/dramatic moments a bit better. It built them up more by sprinkling them throughout the game, whereas Escape From Ever After keeps those for the final chapters. In fact you can pin-point the second the game starts to shift from being a pure comedy to a comedic existential nightmare. Thousand Year Door just felt more tonally consistent.

Regardless of how it compares to its inspiration though, I still loved the story in this game. It had a lot of heart, it got very emotional at times, and it was also genuinely funny. Again, I wish I could go into a bit more detail, but I don’t want to give too much away. It’s best to go in not knowing too many details.

Visually speaking, Escape From Ever After nails it. This thing captures the look of the Paper Mario series perfectly. At least the first two games. The later Paper Mario games leant into the paper aesthetic more, while this keeps more in line with the look of Thousand Year Door. Where the characters looked like paper but weren’t meant to actually be made of it.

The characters aren’t just flat sprites; they have layers to them that makes them look more like paper craft puppets. They all look great, and while there’s nothing as visually impressive as Hooktail, the character designs and how expressive they are more than make up for that. The expressions they have really helps sell the comedy. Flynt may be a little flat as a character, but his sly looks give him a bit more personality.

The environments look nice too, and thanks to the different worlds you visit there’s a healthy amount of visual variety in the locations. I do wish it played into that more. like giving each story its own art-style to match the genre, but you also go from Lovecraft horror town to Treasure Island. That’s a big difference in tone, so I think there’s more than enough variety here.

I can’t stress enough how much this game captures the look of Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door. From the environments to the character designs, you can tell the artists did a lot to try make it look as much like that game as possible. Which is a bit of a problem. The game does such a good job of aping Paper Mario’s style that it lacks a visual identity of its own.

The character designs are nice, and certainly aren’t one to one with Paper Mario’s, but they’re so close to it that it’s hard not to be reminded of it. I’m going to put a pin in this for now though. I’m going to need to get into this a lot more later in the review. Because this games strength is its likeness to Paper Mario, and its biggest weakness is its likeness to Paper Mario.

For now, let’s talk about the music. Because the soundtrack in this game is amazing. It’s so jazzy and upbeat. Even in the games creepier moments the soundtrack never lets up with the bops. It even takes something from the recent Thousand Year Door remake by having every world have its own battle theme, which all sound great and helps prevent battles getting too repetitive.

I was surprised at how catchy this soundtrack was. Honestly, I think its soundtrack is better than Thousand Year Doors. Don’t get me wrong I love the music in that game, but the soundtrack in this is more of what I look for in a video game. Being bouncier and more upbeat. Both OST’s are fantastic, it’s a personal preference thing.

In terms of the presentation, I have no real complaints. There’s no voice acting, but this is a Paper Mario clone. I’d be mad if it did have voice acting. If you’re a fan of Paper Mario, then the visuals alone should make you feel right at home. And that’s before you get into the gameplay.

If you’ve played the first two Paper Mario games, then you’re going to slip right into Escape From Ever After with no issue. Pretty much everything those games did, this one does too. The overworld is the same mix of RPG exploration and puzzle solving with the jumping challenges and action of a platformer.

Flynt is the one you control in the overworld, with the different partners being able to be swapped out at any point to perform their own actions. Tinder can breathe fire, Wolfgang can play his lute, Eve can transform things and Patches can slam the ground. With Flynt himself being able to throw his buckler to activate switches or grab far away objects. Sort of like how Koops worked in Thousand Year Door.

While this all sounds simple, every character’s action has different applications. Tinder can use her fire breath to light torches, illuminate dark areas, or burn things away. Wolfgang can play different songs to make plants grow or create gusts of wind, while Eve’s transformations change depending on what she transforms, and Patches… just smashes the ground. He can delay it and hold himself in place but he’s basically smashy smashy punk bear.

This helps add some extra variety to the puzzle solving. The puzzles themselves are well designed. Nothing is so difficult that you’ll get stumped, but you will get tripped up if you try to rush them. They’re simple enough for players of any skill level to figure out but still clever enough that they require actual thought to solve. The perfect balance for games like this.

There’s also plenty of platforming challenges to do. Like Paper Mario it’s nothing too complex. Nothing here will ever be on par with a more dedicated platformer, but I will say I actually found it better than Thousand Year Door. Flynt had a little more aerial manoeuvrability, and the jumping felt a lot less stiff. So the platforming ended up being a bit more enjoyable here.

Each world has plenty of collectibles to find. Often in out of the way locations, so exploration is encouraged. You’ll have to look around every nook and cranny if you want to find everything. The collectables themselves work similarly to the ones in Paper Mario. Sun Gems are basically just Star Pieces, special currency that can be exchanged for rare items, and the Ink Bottles are like the Shine Sprites. Sort of.

The Ink Bottles don’t level up partners like the Shine Sprites did. Instead, they upgrade the moves each character has. You can’t upgrade their basic attacks, but every other move can be made stronger. The upgrades don’t increase the damage or effectiveness of the move, but it gives it a new property that can make them a lot more useful. Although it can also increase the moves cost so you might want to be mindful of what you upgrade.

Speaking of upgrades, let’s talk about this games level-up system. It’s exactly like Paper Mario’s. Get one hundred experience points and you gain a level and can upgrade your Health Points, Coffee Points which work like Flower Points in Paper Mario, or TP which are used for Trinkets, basically this games version of Badges.

Trinkets are used to further enhance a character. Giving them stat increases, resistances to status ailments, letting them use more moves among other things. Like with Badges you’ll only have a limited number of points to spend on each Trinket, with some of the more powerful ones being more expensive. You’ll have some tough decisions on what you want to equip. Unless you invest entirely in TP, but even then you’ll still have only so much.

See, unlike in Paper Mario, the individual party members all have their own TP pools, and you only gain one Trinket Point on every level up. So your resources are split across multiple characters in this game, and individually they won’t have as much TP by the end as Mario with BP.

But, since every character can equip their own set of Trinkets, this lets you customise each character with different builds. You can make one a tank, one a glass cannon, one a pure support, and if there’s one you can’t think of what to do with just use them to equip whatever useful Trinkets you don’t have room for.

This isn’t a new idea. Bug Fables did this exact same thing, but with this game having more characters it gives you more flexibility in how you customise each of them. It has been a while since I played Bug Fables, so I don’t remember what Badges were like in that, but the Trinkets here are a little too basic. There’s nothing too crazy.

It can make the builds you do feel a bit flat at least in comparison to Thousand Year Door. I think the problem is Thousand Year Door had a lot more moves Mario could equip. There was a healthy balance between new techniques and buffing Badges. Here every character only has about five or six moves each, so there isn’t as much variety in what you can do in comparison.

Another issue I have is every character is too equal. They all have the same health, same defence, and same general attack damage. the only major difference between them is their moves. Which is fine since that’s largely how Paper Mario handled it. But in Thousand Year Door the Partners did have different properties. Koops had lower health but higher defence, Bobbery had the most health, and… actually that’s about it.

Ok that’s not much but it’s something at least. It would have been nice if the party members in this game had something like that. Patches has slightly more power but that’s about it. it would be nice if there was a bit more diversification in them. Like making Tinder immune to burns or making Eve have more moves.

They likely didn’t do this due to the Trinkets. They probably wanted everyone to be neutral so you had a blank slate, or close enough to one, to customise them in any way you like. But they still could have had some more differences outside of what moves they had. Even something like Bravely Default had slight stat differences between the party members, and that had a lot more ways to customise characters.

It still is a good system though. It keeps most of what made Badges so much fun in Paper Mario and having it split across each character feels like a natural evolution of it. My only major complaint is that I wish it went farther. It introduces a great idea of being able to combine Trinkets together. That is a brilliant idea that opens so many possibilities, but it only works on attack up and defence up Trinkets.

They should have expanded on this more. This feels like a great addition to the system and yet it feels undercooked. Like imagine being able to combine attacks together. That would be awesome and add more creativity to the move sets. Maybe I expected too much, but I can’t help but feel a little disappointed since I can see the potential. I can see what it could be, and it just doesn’t live up to that.

But the only thing left to cover is the combat. Which, as you may already be able to predict, is exactly like Paper Mario. It’s turn based, you have two characters out at a time, you have action commands for moves, it’s the same system.

It’s a good system though. Battles are fast paced, the action commands are varied, and there is a decent amount of strategy. There’s a lot of situations where you’ll need certain characters in order to deal with specific enemies. A lot of it should be familiar to those who’ve played the first two Paper Mario’s, but one new addition to the combat are enemies wielding shields. These will not only block attacks from the front but protect any enemy behind them. It’s not a major new addition, but they add some extra strategy in how you handle them.

You can use Wolfgang since his attack not only bypasses defence but sends them to the back of the line. Handy but if they’re not in the front or higher up, since some enemy types can stack on top of each other, that might not be that useful. Instead you can use Tinder to burn the shields away, but only if it’s made of wood. If not, you can use Eve to jump on their heads and beat them that way. Alternatively, Eve has a move that can remove any shield, but it costs CP to use.

My point is that for any given situation you have multiple options, but each option has pros and cons. For example, you might be able to finish fights faster with certain moves, but they might cost CP, which is a limited resource shared between the whole party. So if you use those moves to try and end fights too quickly, you’ll not have as much CP to spend in the harder fights.

There are items to help with this, but you have limited inventory space, and if you run out of CP restoring moves then that means trekking back to a shop to get more. But you will want to keep space open in case you run into items in the field, and you don’t just want to have CP items but healing items too. There are items that heal and restore CP at the same time, but you don’t want to use those willy nilly. You want to save those for when you really need them. Or you can just use the special move that restores your health and CP; assuming you have the SP to spare.

See what I mean. There’s a lot of different factors to consider in a battle. The battle system seems simple at first glance, and in all honesty it is, but there is a hidden depth to it. It’s simple enough for everyone to play, but there’s enough complexity to it that it never feels dumbed down.

The basic enemy fights are fine enough, but the real highlight are the bosses. They all mix up the core combat in fun ways and offer a decent challenge that tests your skills. My favourite being the Cthulhu fight because they force you to swap characters to deal with their status effects. It was a nice test on how each character played. Also, yes, you fight Cthulhu in this game and it’s only the second boss. Told you the game was bonkers.

Escape From Ever After is not a particularly hard game much like its inspiration, but unlike Paper Mario it does offer ways tweaking the difficulty. There are different difficulty levels if you want to make the game easier or harder, and different accessibility options for those that struggle with things like the action commands. So it’s perfectly customisable for your skill level.

So far I’ve been pretty positive, and for good reason. Escape From Ever After is a good game. However, a lot of the reasons why it’s good is because of what it’s copying. Most of what I’ve praised here is also applicable to Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door. In fact, I’m pretty sure one of my points was taken directly from my review of that. Certainly seemed that way as I was writing.

So why don’t we instead talk about what the game does differently from Paper Mario. Well therein lies the rub. There isn’t much of that. It cribs from the Paper Mario playbook too much and doesn’t have much of a mechanical identity of its own. It does make some changes and improvements to the formula, but it does so in a lot of incremental ways.

Some of these I do really like though. Being able to research an enemy with every character is a massive convenience and being able to swap Flynt out of combat is a great change that allows for more party combinations. That’s something Paper Mario should do.

But there’s also changes I don’t like. The way it handles special moves is weird. Specials are tied to the characters themselves, with each having their own unique special move only they can use. In theory this is a good idea, but it doesn’t work as well in practice. Having to swap out characters to use one is a bit clunky, especially since swapping either costs a turn, or the SP used for special moves.

I don’t know why they don’t just let you use them regardless of what character you pick. The whole party comes out to help anyway, so why does who initiates the attack matter. I do like that everyone helps out, and that each move gets stronger as the party increases, but this makes it so that the special moves you get early on are just as powerful as the ones you get in the late game. Which is fine, except the special attacks you get later on are also way more expensive. It’s not very well balanced.

When I first saw this, I assumed it would work like Chrono Trigger. Where different character combinations would have different special moves. Honestly that’s how it probably should have worked given the set-up. At least give each character more than one special if you’re going to lock the moves behind who uses it.

Then there are the things that are missing in Escape From Ever After. I’m not going to complain about everything that isn’t here. Like the whole stage gimmick was something specifically from Thousand Year Door and had systems upon systems built into it. I don’t expect that to be in here, that’s an understandable omission.

But there are some omissions that make the game not necessarily worse, but lesser. Like Stylish Moves and Super Guard. I loved these things because they added an extra layer to the game’s combat. it raised the skill ceiling and rewarded mastery of the combat system. Were they needed? Not really, but the game was richer because of their inclusion, and they allowed for things like BP only runs. Escape From Ever After does have its own guard system where stricter timing can lower the damage, but I didn’t notice much of a difference. It’s not as much fun as the Super Guard was.

These changes don’t necessarily make Escape from Ever After a bad game. I did greatly enjoy my time with it, but there’s no getting around the fact that it is a lesser Thousand Year Door. While it might be better in some ways, it doesn’t quite get the finer details that made Thousand Year Door so special.

Take the item management for instance. It’s limited like in Paper Mario, but the reason why items were limited was to facilitate the cooking mechanic. Where you could combine different items together into one. Cooking isn’t in this game, you just buy items that have combined effects. Which, ok is not the worst way of handling it, but it’s also not as much fun. I mean Bug Fables expanded on the idea and that was one of the best things about that game. Not having it here feels wrong.

It also has a knock-on effect where your less encouraged to buy basic healing items. You had to do that in Paper Mario to combine them, but here you don’t need to. It makes some of the more powerful HP and CP focused ones feel like a waste. Your better off just buying items that do both which makes item management less engaging.

But you see what I mean right. Paper Mario the Thousand Year Door is such a refined game. It has systems built upon systems which form together into a perfect whole. There are things in Escape From Ever After I really like, but it never feels as good as the game it’s trying to imitate.

It also isn’t as content rich. The game is a decent enough length at about 20 hours, and there are plenty of collectibles to find, but it’s lacking in side quests. There aren’t as many of them as in Thousand Year Door or Bug Fables, but the side quests that are here are good and help flesh out the side characters a bit more. I especially love the Red Riding Hood one; that was hilarious. I just wish there were more of them you know.

So where do I stand on this game? Well I enjoyed it quite a bit. I loved the story, I think the game looks and sounds great, and I liked the gameplay a lot. For what it offers it’s well worth the price of admission. But a lot of why I like this is because it copies Thousand Year Door. Every bit of praise I can offer is largely attributed to that game. From mechanics to aesthetic to even many of the set-pieces, they’re all taken from Paper Mario.

This is the issue when it comes to these indie games trying to be other games, they just make you want to play those other games. The best ones will take inspiration from the classics but still have their own identity. Some of my favourites in that regard are Pizza Tower, Freedom Planet 2 and Gravity Circuit. I love those games because they took clear inspiration from some of my favourite series but still did their own thing.

Escape From Ever After never quite does that. I will say if you have a PC, Xbox or PS5 then it is worth it if you want to see why this formula is so beloved. it will give you a good enough idea of what works about it. But if you own a Switch system, you can just get the Thousand Year Door remake. Yeah, this is a cheaper alternative, but at the end of the day Thousand Year Door is the better game. The sad part about this game is that it copies so much from Paper Mario that it winds up in its shadows.

Still, it could be worse. I still think this is worth checking out if nothing else than for the story.  I’m just glad to see Paper Mario is still having an impact all these years later. I hope we see more indie games that try to expand more on the formula since there is still some untapped potential. Or Nintendo could make another one. Like they should have by now. Seriously guys, just make another Paper Mario already! Do you not see the demand.