After hearing about Escape From Ever After I picked it up on kind of a whim. The very clear pitch from the game is that it is drawing inspiration from the heyday of the Paper Mario series. What is more baffling, after I have had some significant time to play it, is that it seems to have pulled it off, which is something even Nintendo has failed to do with the last several iterations.
During the Gamecube era, Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door was a glorious gulp of RPG goodness on Nintendo’s console. Since then, several games have been released in the series, but none of them have hit the same highs as the first two games as they have diverged from the formula that made those games great.
Escape From Ever After takes nearly everything that made those early Paper Mario games great and executes on them perfectly. The main difference is that it has swapped out the Mario Bros. theme for a general storybook one instead, facing off against various fairytales and rhymes like the Three Pigs and Three Blind Mice. The strong and likeable characters, the active battle system where you time prompts for extra hits, and even the paper-themed art style are all here in Escape From Ever After.
While it’s all well and good to copy the formula, the game still has to be good. I’m not even sure why, but Escape From Ever After has pulled it off and it truly feels like a worthy spiritual successor to the Paper Mario series. I won’t go too deep into it here, but if you like the Paper Mario games, I would highly recommend Escape From Ever After. I am having a blast with it so far.
