How many colors do you really need to depict a subterranean world of mansions, labs, speakeasies, sewers, and dungeons? Everdeep Aurora chooses to drain out all the color you don’t need, until you’re left with a very striking art style that draws you into its world and leaves behind whiplash when you exit it.
Shell the cat wakes up one rainy night on a bench, finds her mother missing, acquires a drill from a frog, and decides to drill down to find her mother. The surface is being hammered by meteors, and an apocalyptic mood has set in among the residents. But where is mother? Shell will have to meet people of all kinds of persuasions who have taken refuge underground, and find her solutions herself.
Comparing games to that old warhorse Dark Souls has become a rote exercise in the year 2025, but I’ll do you a special: Everdeep Aurora is a game with no combat whatsoever that borrows the obtuseness of Dark Souls’ characters and storytelling. There’s no grand lore drops, no handholding in matters of context, and no certainly no explanation as to how characters get around without drilling the underground into a gigantic cavern.
That’s alright – we need rocks for Shell to dig after all (the character, not the oil and gas company). Shell’s drill works on a mineral called Duracite and has to be recharged frequently at certain recharger stations peppered across the underground world.
It’s a strange design – Shell has to struggle to traverse anywhere, but even after her drill runs out of juice, she can seemingly still use it to break rocks just fine. You can also have the frog Ribbert rescue you at any point back to the last camp, in case you’re stuck.
Taken together, these design decisions make the game’s main challenge – traversal – feel superficial. You drill, drill, drill, and it’s all just to get from one place to another. The characters you meet speak briefly, and you’ll sometimes have items to deliver from one place to another, keys that let you access locked areas, but at no point in Everdeep Aurora did I feel tethered to the world and story it was expressing.
I felt myself drifting through this world like tumbleweed, until at one point the game ended and credits rolled. As I sit here writing this review, I feel like I have more questions about the game after playing it than before. In short, Everdeep Aurora was 4-hour experience that left me wondering “What the hell just happened?”
My take on this game must sound negative, but I need to lay special stress on the game’s music. Much like the game’s use of color and sprite work, its music is luminous and well-defined, adding to the atmosphere and sometimes even defining it. I look forward to listening to the game’s soundtrack post-release.
Everdeep Aurora is a game that’s tough to recommend, because it doesn’t seem to be built for a specific kind of player so much as it is built for a certain mood. This is a game you play in the dark on a quiet, perhaps rainy night, exploring a world of darkness and light, meeting strange but fascinating characters, and piecing together a world you don’t immediately understand.
Developer: Nautilus Games
Country of Origin: Spain
Publisher: Ysbryd Games
Release Date: July 10, 2025 (PC, Switch)
The PC version of the game was played for this review of Everdeep Aurora.
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