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Like its spiritual counterpart, Everhood has a generally light-hearted front it puts up. For a bit anyway. After the first chapter is when that veneer is TORN AWAY and a much more grim and surreal story begins...
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HERE THERE BE SPOILERS, both major and minor, as a major draw to this game is a story where the twist happens fairly early on in its run time. It really is important to play it first, if you mind it.
You have been warned...
- The ATM is rather disconcerting. Being a boss-shoutout to Flowey, of all things, asking for your soul in exchange for currency and flashing a ghoulish face as it attacks you while spastically twitching. It's also fully 3D in a mostly 2D game and we never get to know where it came from, with the only clue being that it claims to be "Evil Property". It's also revealed to be one of the 30 souls you're looking for if you're trying to kill everyone, raising further questions as to what the hell it even is.
- The tone of the game is immediately very abstract and uneasy. Unlike its contemporaries, it has a very dark color scheme, with a black backdrop to highlight the colors of the environment and characters. It gives most of the game the feeling that it is set in darkness, or that it is Always Night.
- After fighting Zigg, you can go into the room he was staring at down the corridor, and find a mysterious black figure with a white face simply called a Lost Soul. All it does is say "Please, take this" and hands you a Magic 8 Ball before vanishing. It sounds strange, but not out of character for the game's tone so far until you examine it in the inventory and get the simple but terrifyingly vague description of "28 souls are left."
- The end of the first act, where you confront Gold Pig and are suddenly dropped into an incinerator. While it is possible to survive it, it is such an Unexpected Gameplay Change of avoiding musical hazards in the top-down "exploring" perspective.
- Should you (most likely) die to Gold Pig's Incinerator, you're treated to a very surreal sequence of two parts, the first being called Post Mortem and the second simply called Gnomes, where a lot of bizarre technicolor imagery assaults you as you dodge beats made by many... hard to describe things such as:
- Gnomes playing tennis with their own heads, and one ATTACKING YOU with some!
- The Avatars of the two game developers. Probably the least scary of the bunch.
- A boxy, skull-headed... thing with a hand puppet that falls apart on its own after a bit.
- A giant dark head with bright eyes and teeth, who speaks in pixel gibberish.
- The Maze Monster. It appears to be a spider-like abomination with more eyes than a spider should and a gaping maw, and it randomly travels around the maze at a speed faster than you can ever run at, striking out of nowhere. When you eventually bump into it, its music (while pretty awesome) makes it sound as if the creature is alternating between aggressively stomping towards you and skittering around, and to escape this horror you need to step on a spring rather than wait it out like most other opponents in the first half of the game. Then there’s noise it makes. Hell Is That Noise does not even begin to describe this thing. When you finally do get to kill it, it lets out a loud and sudden shriek.
- You find your arm amongst Gold Pig's hoard, surrounded by many bricks, before you actually pick it up the screen flashes with lightning, highlighting tons of blood-red messages hidden by the brick patterns. The game double checks if you want to pick up your own arm at that point. Judging from the fact that it can kill the immortal beings, that warning's necessary.
- The events leading up to and including the Incinerator II special encounter. After defeating the Cat God and playing Super Racket 2 with Sam, they get curious about the locked cabin on the right, which they unlock and examine, before deciding quickly they don't want anything to do with that and rushing out of the treehouse. After this, the game refuses to let you leave the treehouse, meaning, to progress, you have no choice but to enter the cabin on the right. Once Red enters it, the door suddenly shuts and bars fall down to further block the door before the word INCINERATOR appear above it. Then everything fades to black barring the door and the text, as you here the incinerator warm-up and the words In progress appear between the door and the word. You are then thrust into the encounter where your health bar is flashing as if you're at 1HP, although the first pattern which is tossed at you as the music kicks in is relatively easy to dodge. But then the music speeds up, as does the pattern, as one of the Higher Beings appears, although their neon colours are shades of red. And then, it suddenly shifts to a much bigger area as the second pattern kicks in, as walls of flames approach from both sides with no gap for Red to dodge them, eventually finishing off Red and triggering either the "Yellow Doll" or "Alone" endings.
- The Cat God's appearances in the game are few and far between, but it can give players a start in every one. It even appears as soon as the game as booted up, showing itself on the title screen, lurking behind the game's name and staring at you.
- In a playthrough proper, the Cat God's first appearance is during the normal ending, after everyone in Everhood finally passes on. Regardless of whether the player chooses to hear the final Absolute Truth, the Cat God will tell the player to come visit again, appear on screen without its eyes, and gradually get closer; it even starts to warp the screen after a certain point. Then before the game cuts to black, it says, "It never ends in Everhood."
- The Cat God in its own battle will also appear without its eyes on two occasions. In both occasions however, it will also have its mouth wide open, baring its fangs while flashing red, green, and blue, all while the background turns to static. The second occasion is especially noteworthy because it isn't just the background that turns to static then—the music does, too. And if the player manages to deplete the Cat God's HP, it will begin to flash red with its eyes glowing brightly and maw agape, proceed to get closer to the screen just as it does in the normal ending, and throw the player into yet another battle--or so it would seem. After the screen turns dark and remains that way for a few seconds, it goes white, then the game asks if the player got scared for a second and laughs about it before offering to tell them a secret absolute truth.
- If one tries to start a file on which they've already achieved the normal ending, they will be greeted with a rapidly scrolling screen of random text set to static noise, and get kicked back to the file select menu.
- Green's Corridor. It's a Room Full of Crazy with tally marks marking how long they and anyone else as old as they are have been alive, with each tally being one full year. They had to make the corridor longer, and longer, and longer to make room for more tally marks. How many? People broke down that there were at least 702 sets of tally marks per screen, with 888 screens worth of them, counting for 3,113,370 total. And that's just when Green started bothering to count.
- If you go into the Club after you killed everyone inside and out, the music slows down to a crawl the next time you come in, showing this is the End of an Era.
- Near the end of the game, you learn a lot of things about the characters that not even they knew. For example, for Noseferatchu: he didn't even realize he was immortal and living the same boring and pointless life for all eternity. Plus, it seems like his been sick the entire time too which must have been unpleasant. Even in the afterlife, he's still sick. When you find his bedroom, he notes that he probably should get more furniture. So not only has this guy possibly been sick for a literal eternity, he's lonely beyond belief, stuck with videogames that look like they come from the 1990s, and doesn't know he's been doing this for millions of years, he also has literally nothing to show for it.
- When you travel through the desert, you see what looks like the remains of a medieval style city. It becomes clear later on that this must be where the majority of the multi-million large society lived in the distant past. So much time has passed, that the place is so thoroughly buried and destroyed, that it looks like a long lost city of antiquity. All that is left is some ruins and a hard packed dirt road.
