Evan's Remains

First Impressions

Across all languages the Steam page holds 2,131 reviews, 1,866 of them positive — 88%, labelled Very Positive (2026-09-16 snapshot). In English alone it is 1,099 reviews at 89%; in Japanese, 47 of 50. The number barely moves between pools.

That is a calm number. Sort the negative side by helpfulness, though, and the volume is wildly out of proportion. "Boring." "A hot convoluted mess." "It wants you to waste your time." Nothing in the percentage predicts that much anger from a tenth of the audience.

Read them and the reason shows. They are not attacking the puzzles. What they are angry about is one late move — and it is the same move the positive side praises hardest. That is what I want to follow here.

Putting the Mechanics into Words

Each puzzle fits on one screen. Platforms vanish once you step off them. Stepping on certain blocks makes other blocks appear or disappear. Over time the game adds teleporting blocks, blocks that reset the board, blocks that move other blocks, and blocks that change how high you jump.

The positive reviews call this layer "intuitive" and say it "never tries to trick you". The negative reviews call the same layer "too easy" and say you can "brute-force them". They are describing one texture through two expectations.

In Puzzlebyrinth's terms, this is a design that adds nouns while holding the verbs constant. You walk, you jump, you step — that is the whole verb set, start to finish; what grows is the vocabulary of what can be stepped on. It stops deliberately short of combinatorial explosion, choosing legibility over difficulty. As a puzzle platformer it sits firmly on the readable side.

The Feel of the Story

The story is written in the grammar of Japanese adventure games. Conversations are long, and reading outlasts solving. One Japanese review put it bluntly: more than half the playtime is spent reading text. There is no story between the puzzles; there are puzzles between the story.

Then a late move relabels everything you have already read. The positive side reaches for "gut-twisting", "brilliantly written", "a good story rather than a feel-good one". The negative side reaches for "lying to the player the whole time", "unnecessarily cruel", "anti-To The Moon".

Chapters are read from 1 to 5. Meaning runs the other way. Only the filled fifth box relabels everything read before it (diagram)

Structurally this is a design in which information runs backwards. Deduction games like Return of the Obra Dinn stack observations forwards. What is spent here is not observation but trust: the game banks on how plainly you took things, then collects on that reading at the end.

The move is powerful when it lands. When it misses, almost nothing is left to the person it missed except the word betrayed. It splits an audience the same way Twelve Minutes and Lorelei and the Laser Eyes do — not a failure, but a question of how far the design reaches.

Pacing

Completion times mentioned in reviews cluster between 2.4 and 5.5 hours, with a median near three. The price is $6.99. This is a short game.

The puzzles can be skipped. The positive side reads that as the nerve to put story first; the negative side reads it as forfeiting the right to be called a puzzle game. David Bakker at Gamecritics gave it 9/10 and treated making play optional as the argument the game is making. What users read as a shortcut, the critic read as a claim.

To my eye, the brevity is what lets the gamble work. At three hours the late relabelling lands once and cleanly. Run the same trick across twenty hours and the time spent converts directly into anger. Shortness is not a limitation here; it is a precondition.

Reviews Consulted

This article was written from the Steam user reviews as of 2026-09-16. No review text is quoted directly; recurring claims are reconstructed.

・Steam: Evan's Remains (1,866 of 2,131 reviews positive across all languages = 88%, Very Positive; 1,099 reviews at 89% in English, 47 of 50 in Japanese)

・Read: top 10 helpful positive, top 10 helpful negative, 10 recent, and the Japanese-language reviews

・Gamecritics — Evan's Remains Review (David Bakker, 9/10), NookGaming's review

・The figure in this article is an original diagram by Komugi. The Steam image CDN was unreachable from this run, so no game screenshot could be inspected, and no unverified image was used.

Closing

Steam's aggregate is 88% positive. I score it 7.0. Lower than the aggregate, but this is not a complaint about the game: the design is coherent, and the range that coherence reaches is narrow.

I would not recommend it to someone buying it for the puzzles. The puzzles here are not carrying difficulty; they are pacing the reading. If you like games such as OneShot, where the trick and the story land on the same move, three hours at $6.99 is a fair bet.

Eight of the last ten reviews are positive, so nothing is shifting with time. This game's reception does not move. The only variable is what the player thought they were buying.