The Nevermore series is gaming’s version of subverted children’s programming: Everything is friendly and vivid, but with inspired characters and mystery that never get pushed aside by needless dialogue or the game’s own limitations. Nevermore 3 manages to be the best entry in the series by far, by eliminating annoying features like death from previous entries while fine-tuning the atmosphere of the world. Although there are minor problems with it’s platforming, this is a true gem of a flash platformer and one that every indie game fan should take.

Ivor the Engine was a British children’s show that ran for nearly 20 years in syndication on the BBC. The show was distinctly British: Everyone was polite, plots were never too serious, and the humor subverted (Ivor worked for the Merioneth and Llantisilly Rail Traction Company Limited). The shows are cult-classics for the fact that, like Seinfeld, nothing ever really happens; and to this reviewer – that’s Nevermore 3.

There is a plot about saving your village, but it’s treated rather lightly until the finale (which is brilliant) makes you re-analyze the adventure as well as surprises you with a beautiful redemption morale. I won’t spoil it; after all, morale’s are rarely a part of the gaming culture, so it was a joy to discover that Nevermore not only has one, but that it and the ending are so surprisingly clever that they cast a nice memory over the entire experience while also offering a wink to older Nevermore veterans.

The graphics are the best yet, with graceful rolling plains and underground memori­als all rendered in bright vivid colors. The darker tones of your main character and the aardvark-like people that hang around makes the games feel like a mix of MYST and the Moomins. When your main charac­ter jumps through a tree, the sound of him coming in and out is on cue, but the leaves that fall out are not. When you see it in motion, it’s comical, and it made me think about the physical comedy inherent in Pixar films. Sure it was subtle and not hilarious by any means, but these moments are what make a great game.

Sound-effects are just the tip of the iceberg, well… the bulk of the iceberg. Most of the game is filled with the background sounds of Nevermore, the wind blowing, plinking pia­nos and the sounds of the wild, represented in Banjo Kazooie nonsense. But rather than flood our ears, the game takes the reserved method of giving us one synth note to represent dialogue, a very welcome change. The music is present in the very beginning scene, which really wonderfully sets up the adventure before disappearing for a majority of the game. Approaching the game’s con­clusion, the music changes frequency, pitch and intensity to represent that you are get­ting closer to your destiny. The score is done by “The Very Odd House,” who has done commission for Radio Disney and EMI, and it adds a lot of meat to the atmosphere’s stew. It’s a classy score too, like Jon Brion doing music for an Oddworld title.

I don’t know much about Sophie Houlden’s “Platform Game Engine”, but if NM3 is any sign, then this engine is woefully underused. Controls are flawless and the game has no problem busting out very vivid hand-drawn graphics. Some people on the Internet (www.indiegames.com) have likened it to a fetch quest, but that’s quite misleading. The game only makes you backtrack when you make a mistake, and the couple times you do, it never gives you too much area to cover. In fact, messing up usually leads to a different hat. The hat’s don’t do anything except change the look on the character (green hat, old skull, a very sportingly purple beanie), but it’s nice that the developer found a way to go, “oh, you missed the jump, that’s OK have a present.”

One major problem was that, while it’s always obvious where to go, there’s no way to tell exactly what is solid ground and what isn’t. It happens throughout the game, and I imagine it to be a purposeful flaw, but one that every gamer will have a different tolerance for. For me, it wasn’t even an issue. And although the game is a strict platformer, -just jump (space bar) and left and right- there’s a few times that I was worried the game was going to trick me, that I had to click something with the mouse or press up on a door. But it was my own ignorance of the games simplicity, and thankfully so. There’s nothing worse than having an unforeseen instruction that later becomes necessary to play the game (here’s looking at you, Milon’s Secret Castle). And although it’s explained, I really did not enjoy having to move my hand to click on word bubbles. Never in the rest of the game do you use the mouse, so having to move my hand off the keys to click the dialogue bubble seemed stupid. I can try and trick myself into thinking the developer wanted you to read the whole word tree so having you grab your mouse would force you, but that’s reaching a bit.

NW3 is a great game and maybe its biggest strength is its length: It’s about a half hour long. I can honestly say that if it wasn’t for its length, I would never have played it, and I would really have missed out. I clear my cookies frequently and I know a lot of other PC users that do too, destroying my ability to get through a substantially lengthy flash game is hindered. And I don’t know many players who would realistically would come back to finish a game, but I would come back to NW3. We put so much on length these days that we forget we are padding our games with sub-quests and repeating objectives. People play games for a healthy marriage of gameplay and expectation, whether that expectation is a rank, points or a story. But stopping your quest to save the world to race Chocobos or farm takes the player out of the experience. NW3 knows what it does best and sticks with it. Because of that, it’s a joy to experience.

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