Ever Oasis

2026-02-14
Every time you switch to Levi, one of the fucked up anthropomorphic scorpion companions, he lets out his little programmed bark and to my ear it sounded like he would say "Sheeit". "Sheeit sheeit sheeit", I must have heard that bark hundreds of times. It was like I had my own little Clay Davis palling around with me. Fitting then that Ever Oasis feels like sheeit most of the time you're playing it. A parade of cutscenes and zero autonomy as the game pushes you through the motions of its unengaging combat, endless fetch quests paired with slow walking, and simplistic town building. I bailed after 9 hours back in 2017.

And while coming back I found the same drudgery–in boring fetch quests, low drop rates, and bad combat where a death sends you back 10 minutes due to a lack of save points–I also fell in love with the Zelda-lite dungeons. Some of that affection is probably because in the 9 years since I last played I developed a taste for the N64 Zeldas (Majora's Mask especially) on the 3DS, made by none other than Grezzo, the devs on Ever Oasis. Here we get a really simple version of Zelda dungeons. Maybe 20 rooms, 3 keys you need to collect to progress, a couple minibosses, a boss, and a handful of small puzzles to do along the way. Nothing on offer here is truly mind-blowing, in fact most of it feels like it’s targeted at the mind of a 10 year old, but there’s something deeply pleasing about entering a room with a little 5 minute puzzle to crack using the myriad abilities you unlock through your oasis’ residents.

If the dungeons are the oasis in Ever Oasis then the desert is just about everything else about the gameplay. The core of the game is the interplay between progressing through the dungeons and expanding your settlement. The problem is each and every part of the settlement side is some mixture of grindy, repetitive, or fiddly. The loop for growing your settlement is this: you hear about a new resident and they want balloons so you set off to recruit the Seedling with the balloon shop. You do their fetch quest and kill some generic mob or get some generic mat, go into a menu to set up the balloon shop, separately go off to farm the mats for the shop so its stocked, walk up to the shop and open a separate menu to stock it, then hope and pray the balloon-craving resident is still visiting otherwise you have to fuck off and wait for them to come back before you can finally talk to them and get them to join. After successfully recruiting your new balloon-huffing resident they will then tell you about the next resident who wants bongs and Grateful Dead t-shirts or whatever and the process repeats. If this sounds boring it's because it is. It's basically a chain of fetch quests. That goes on seemingly forever. Your reward is uhhh money? Which is used to slowly upgrade your gear through an incredibly boring crafting system. It's all one big grind and the only reward that resonated with me was the visual splendor of your settlement as it slowly grows.

And you know what I think that grind would be fine if it wasn't so fucking fiddly. All of these little tasks are in different menus in different places. You want to stock up a shop? Well, that’s one of two menus. You’re in a dungeon and realized you brought the wrong companions for the puzzles here? Well hit the teleport button to go back to base then walk to the guy to open the menu to change out your companions then go back to the teleportal thing to get back. Why can’t I just change my companions while I’m in the dungeon and not in combat? Go fuck yourself that’s why.

Or even the shops. Certain cretinous residents will only join if you have like 3 separate shops set up for them. And you won’t know them all up front. So Seedling McShitbag says “I want balloons” ok cool lemme get that for you. Since I’m at max capacity for shops (you always fucking will be) lemme remove the Soup shop for your Balloon shop. Ok cool I talk to McShitbag and he says “FUuuuck these are some good balloons, man. Know what would go good with balloons? Soup.” You say OK Shitbag, you manlet FUCK, lemme go back into this stupid fucking menu and delete the balloon shop and add the SOUP shop because we all need soup after a balloon am I right?? You go back to our seedy little friend and McShitbag looks up from his steaming bowl of desert sand soup with his beady, nitrous-infused, bloodshot eyes and slurs out “I could really go for a shhhhcarf.” So you go right back in the menu for the third time to do this whole dance again. And I’m telling you it’s exactly as tedious as it sounds. The town management is just bad. There’s no strategy, no planning, no style, no fun. It sucks. Even if I do enjoy the little animations when a store sprouts up out of the ground. It’s a fucking tiny consolation prize.

Despite the fiddliness and the combat that's dead on arrival and it's final boss that's just the most tedious slog--which makes sense because his name is literally "Sheut"--and the companions that can't be fucking asked to help in combat and the end-game that wants you to do endless procedurally generated dungeons with their absolutely constipated drop rates refusing to squirt out even one drop of the mats you need to upgrade your weapon to the next tier--despite all that I still had fun. Mainly it's the dungeons. And how cute everything is. The Seedlings, the rabbit-y Lagora, the lizard-lady Drauk, and yeah even the horrifying Serkah who talk by moving a mandible across their face [shudders] sheeeeit. The way your oasis starts as this little hovel and gradually becomes this visually splendorific town full of residents milling about. There's a lot of heart here, it just feels like the game that surrounds it needed to be polished to make it less of a time waster. Why on earth is this game 30 hours long? Make it 10 or 15 and shit I’ll move into your town in the desert. Just make sure you got enough balloons. And soup.