Evertale is the boldest and saddest gaming lie I’ve ever encountered

It’s nothing new that mobile game ads lie. So in the literal sense. The only thing that is true about an estimated two-thirds of YouTube spots for mobile games is the title, as clicking on the shared link actually leads to a game in the store with the exact name advertised in the trailer. But for a few years now, what’s happening here has been taking on a really wild streak: The game scenes shown in the ads often have nothing, absolutely nothing, to do with the game they’re advertising.

As a core gamer, you rarely notice this enough – I personally wasn’t even aware of it until a while ago. Normally we can ignore that, too, because we console and PC gamers are rarely interested in the kind of smartphone games that I – a little elitist maybe – like to dismiss as mindless time wasters. For me, they rarely have anything to do with gaming culture, I usually don’t even really perceive them as video games. And now Evertale has been pushing me for a good two weeks – and making me really, really angry.

Because: The game that Evertale claims to be in half a dozen clips looks really, really cool. A mix of Pokémon and Earthbound or Undertale jumping wildly through graphic generations and styles, with blatant horror elements and a real WTF!? factor. I was really, really curious about this, would have gladly paid a tenner or more for it. Except that this game, which promises a cool retro psycho trip, simply doesn’t exist. Not even remotely.

If you fall for the disturbing Evertale spots and download the title from the App Store, you are greeted by a several-year-old gacha monster collector with pay-to-win and sterile manga optics. It doesn’t even provide the same perspective of the game as in the advertisement, it’s staged isometrically instead of from the classic vertical top view. The overall tone is a different generic unimaginative bar fantasy I would call that. If there are still significant snags, others will have to find out. I only endured this miserable sham for three quarters of an hour.

The strange thing is that the user ratings for Evertale are surprisingly good and the game seems to be on a reasonably stable footing, apart from the soulless optics and the robber baronial monetization criticized by many. But how are you supposed to believe a title that entices you to download with completely far-fetched promises?

Ever since the first images of Killzone 2, we gamers have known that we need to rein in our expectations when we see trailers. But what is happening here is simply absurd. Because what do those responsible think, what happens when someone looks into a game because of the new spots that doesn’t even try to fulfill the fueled expectations? Even if you don’t factor quality into the assessment of this promotion, this is like buying a movie ticket for an Avengers trailer and then being shown a Bond film. That’s not okay per se.

There must be some kind of logic behind it – to puff up the download numbers for the next quarterly report to the shareholders at short notice, for example. But as a potential customer, I would feel like a fool even before the tutorial and would be careful not to invest even a cent in this windy pawn catch. Above all, I think it’s a shame that Evertale simply doesn’t exist in the form advertised here. This game that never was looks cool, mysterious and quirky. I would have liked to kneel in here – and instead I’m allowed to feel pretty stupid. A feeling that one likes to awaken in potential customers…

Still, there is one thing Evertale did achieve: I started Deltarune again and will finally finish it this time.