With its interesting mix of both naturalistic and harshly sparse aesthetics, a slowly-unfolding and somewhat sad story of a young girl and her very distracted mother, and unusual and stealthy puzzles Ever Forward does make an impression. More often than not the issue is that from time to time you’ll hit a particular puzzle that you’ll struggle mightily to overcome, and usually not from the execution side so much as being unsure what you’re even supposed to do. Granted, if you would prefer not to have a game holding your hand and want all leaps of logic to come from within this could be a major positive, but what’s usually confounding is that there is so little to work with mechanically that more often than not you’re left to bang your head against the wall as you’re stuck without even having many tools at your disposal to hope to work with. If you love to be challenged or are willing to seek out some help in order to enjoy the smoother patches and the story the game has some positives, but the severity of the spikes in difficulty without any sort of aid to ease them down is tough to overlook.