The lingering sadness of Evan’s Remains
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Full spoilers for Evan’s Remains follow...
It takes a long time for Evan’s Remains (maitan69, 2020) to unwind itself. Information is laced into conversations with bewildering confidence in the player’s comprehension, flashbacks and lore dumps used not so much as narrative devices than stage directions. There is no clear audience insert so there is no immediate conduit by which to interpret the futuristic yet ancient world that Evan’s Remains resides within. So when the pieces lock and the curtains are drawn it is almost a relief to realize the degree of abstraction the game is comfortable working in, that the player doesn’t need to understand the significance of SpyMaster or the existence of teleportation and pocket dimensions. This story is both much simpler and more ambiguous than it's set dressing suggests.
Evan’s Remains is a puzzle platformer where-in Dysis, a woman in a sunhat of unknown affiliation, is searching a deserted island for Evan, a man of huge scientific importance who has voluntarily disappeared. Very quickly Dysis encounters Clover who is also exploring the island but in the hopes of discovering a lost relic able to bestow immortality. Seeing the progress Clover has already made, Dysis joins up with him and they begin traversing the island by way of a series of monuments.
For most of Evan’s Remains, it is difficult to tell if the game is building towards anything. It presents as narratively ambitious, frontloading its lore and giving as much if not more time to character interactions as it does puzzle solving. But for all this, the story always feels loose, like it is only as deep as is required to hold a scene together and were a character to ask the wrong question the whole façade would come crumbling down. Then the game starts pulling out bricks itself.
It happens that Clover’s quest is an elaborate decoy constructed by Evan to placate Clover’s grief. Clover is terminally ill with an unknown disease, as is his sister, Dysis (distinct from the sunhat Dysis), which is what caused him to come to this island in the first place. He knows he won’t last, but he hopes that finding this relic will let his sister live.
Evan knew about Clover’s illness and found the island first, only to discover that the relic wasn’t real. Rather than give up, Evan decided to fake it. He altered the relics, built a new meaning for Clover to interpret, hoping only to bring him some peace before he died. But of course, Clover wanted the relic for his sister, which is how Dysis in a sunhat entered the picture. Dysis is an actor. Her role was to find Clover, befriend him, and eventually convince him that she was his sister and that the island’s magnetic field had slowed time for him while she aged normally. In his desperation, Clover believes her. Then he dies in her arms. OK, still with me?
All of Evan’s Remains science fiction machinations have been building towards this moment, and it is only at this point that the player sees how all the proper nouns, island lore, and ominous corporate mystery were only ever meant to steer Clover towards believing his sister had survived her illness and found him on this island. It is obscene, it is messy, but it explains a lot. Had the game ended here, it would fit somewhat uncomfortably into our contemporary fascination with “sick-lit,” heartwarming stories about the terminally ill dying after discovering true happiness. I am not entirely ready to say Evan’s Remains isn’t guilty of employing the same devices as sick-lit, but it’s the final scene that leaves it somewhere else.
After fainting when Clover dies in her arms, Dysis awakes in Clover’s home village as his funeral is taking place. Evan is there, along with another scientist, and they are arguing about if what they did was right. What seemed altruistic before now appears manipulative and ghoulish in the wake of Clover’s death. He died believing a lie, believing his sister had survived and was holding him when she had already died somewhere far away. Evan wanted to help his friend, to save him from his torment, but the only way he could conceive of doing so was betrayal on an island-sized scale.
It is a devastating rejection of everything Evan’s Remains spends the rest of the game constructing, a twist of an invisible knife. Evan cannot resolve his guilt and uncertainty and neither does the game attempt to justify itself. It simply ends, letting the melancholy and loneliness hang limply in the air. In “Nothing Feels as Real,” Julie Passanante Elman, associate professor at the University of Missouri, writes that sick-lit’s purpose is “offering a good cry as a form of rehabilitative treatment…” We are meant to cry, to empathize with the terminally ill, then to go on living with a newfound vigor and appreciation of our lives. But in doing so we are reducing another life into a moral platitude.
Evan’s Remains employs many of the same tactics as sick-lit, but it doesn’t give its characters the bittersweet ending they’re desperate for. This is undercut tremendously by a tactless post-credits scene immortalizing the game’s Kickstarter backers, but that aside the game’s conclusion is remarkably sad, or at least hopeless. The jointly authored paper “Literary Plastination: From Body’s Objectification to the Ontological Representation of Death…” positions sick-lit within a wider cultural separation of death from the body. The paper posits that as death becomes less present in most people’s lives due to advances in medicine, our mechanisms for navigating the emotional impact of death have similarly deserted us.
In place of being able to conceptualize and resolve our response to death, we have disconnected the loss of a person from the death of their body. Sick-lit’s fixation on the death of the body is viewed as tasteless as it violates this refocusing of what death is. It is not the loss of a body, it’s the loss of the person, so why are we spending so much time focusing on how their body is failing them? Evan’s Remains sidesteps this discussion as the mechanics of the illness which kills Clover are purposefully unclear, and his death occurs off-screen. His death is allowed to remain one of personhood, not of bodily failure.
But still, the significance is left upon Evan and his wresting of control from Clover by way of his plot. Evan’s Remains’ monologues and collapsed world-building begins to make more sense when recognizing that the game is structured not as a linear narrative but a morality play. Everything is intense and big and driving at the central theme of trust and hopelessness. Evan wants to repay Clover for trusting him when he was homeless and welcoming Evan into his home. But he cannot stop the disease so he resorts to what he is good at, bluffing, reading people, setting a plot in motion. His love of and skill at the game SpyMaster becomes a desperate attempt to give Clover a peaceful death. But it is still, always, a lie.
I am not sure if Evan’s Remains entirely earns its thematic heft when so much of it is inscrutable, but that it is willing to end its plot in a moment of intense duress is daring enough to elevate its weaker moments. It helps significantly that its sets are gorgeously rendered, pixel art that moves so smoothly as to verge on the unnerving but always immaculately lit and drawn. Landscapes of flowers and alien water pumps add flavor to a world that doesn’t always make use of its beauty but is nevertheless richer for it. Evan’s Remains is untidy, its themes barely cohesive. But if it were not so unusual, if it had simply doubled-down on puzzles and pretty screens, I do not think it would have left half the impression it did.
Evan's Remains was reviewed on PC using a copy provided by the developer.
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