Evangeline Review

I am always very cautious to wholeheartedly recommend a game, even when it comes to games that I love: I have always found something that they could do better. With Evangeline, a new First Person Experience from Raconteur games, there is nothing it can do better. Raconteur set out with a simple goal and hit it out of the park in what is a short but immensely thought-provoking story. If this sounds like a conclusion, it basically is: Evangeline is so short and everything is so closely tied together that I don’t really want to spoil anything - if you trust my word, stop reading here and go and play this game now.

If you want to know a little more about Evangeline, I can skirt around the mechanics and try my best to avoid giving anything away. Evangeline takes place over the course of a few days, and each day sees you exploring the same street, completing mundane tasks like taking out the rubbish. As you complete the tasks, colour will return to the street to let you know that you can continue, but those aren’t really what you want to be doing. The real interesting things to find are the notes that are stuck to various objects belonging to your neighbours.

These notes give you brief glimpses into the lives of the families who live on your street, building up a few open ended narratives. These narratives are entirely optional and mostly contextless, but they paint an exquisite picture of life in the 1980s and I found myself emotionally attached to characters only in the game through their notes and environmental details.

This game reminded me so much of Gone Home, from it’s style of storytelling to its use of puzzles to partially gate content. The puzzles in both games are simple, with the ones in Evangeline being much simpler but nonetheless effective at stopping the player progressing until they work out the single clue each day starts with. Some are easy and others are a little more challenging, but the whole game took me no more than about half an hour to play through - and I’ve done so a couple of times now.

There really isn’t anything else for me to tell you, except to please go and play this game. It’s cheap, and won’t take much of your time, and will hopefully give you something to think about. Come the end of the year, I’ll come to bat for this game to receive an honorable mention for Game of the Year, because while Evangeline might not deserve that accolade it deserves to be played, and it has earned Raconteur a big fan in myself.