Ebenezer and the Invisible World review in Three Minutes - On Thin Ice

Ebenezer and the Invisible World review in three minutes - On Thin Ice
As much as it’s a cliche to say it, Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is a timeless classic. The story it weaves about mortality, morality, and the things we leave behind when we’re gone feels just as pertinent today. Unfortunately, Ebezer and the Invisible World feels so caught up in where we are now that it never manages to spread its creative wings.
We’ve been to the present, let’s go to the past. Metroidvanias have hit their stride over the last decade. Blending exploration with mechanics, they illuminate the world you start in by flipping it over and changing your perspective. There’s no reason why Ebenezer and the Invisible World, a Charles Dickens Metroidvania can’t work in theory but, in my playtime, it never did for me.
I like the idea but it fails in some of the fundamental steps of what makes those games work. Instead, it feels like a game built on a shaky foundation desperate to turn back time on a life that is nearing the end. Alright, we’ve somehow gone off-topic again.
An example of this, as well as having traditional movement and attacks, you have a quick dodge that moves you away. It only sends you backwards which makes combat incredibly awkward. It does make up for this by giving a directional dash after an hour or so with the game but I stopped using the dodge entirely when I got that dash.
This would be okay if combat wasn't so clunky. Slow swings and unavoidable animations means that any more one hit means you always take one in response. You can take things super slowly to beat enemies easily or do it quickly and feel cheated when you die. One way, you are bored, the other annoyed. It does aim to fix this with more attacks, abilities and enemies as you go on but a solid foundation would have stopped them from having to fix it in the first place.
Every criticism I have has a workaround in some form but many of them don't end up fixing the problem, only alleviating it somewhat. It's painkillers for an infection, not a blanket on a cold day. One last example of this can be found in the second central boss. Awkward attack animations, poor combat, and little creativity in the arena mean you take unavoidable hits and a lack of a health bar on the boss leaves you swinging in the dark until you win. This is incredibly tedious but you can opt to spend coins achieved from fights to load up with health items, which can be stockpiled and spammed, while you just stand still and hit. You can make your way through the majority of the bosses with this method.
Aesthetically, Ebenezer and the Invisible World is simple but effective, Lines are clean and easy to make out but they lack the level of charm I was looking for from a setup like this. The story is also convoluted and never fully justified. Decisions don't really make sense at any one point. You are constantly driven by the forces of the ghosts around you and rarely given your own agency, instead feeling like a caricature of a man who has had a sudden moral epiphany. This is only a minor grievance.
One of the bigger problems I had was the litany of bugs infesting this game. Text was almost indecipherable in a quarter of text boxes, it regularly crashed, and many visual and mechanical problems would require a complete restart. I held back my review to a day after embargo to test the game out with a launch build and many of these problems have stayed. In the smaller cases, sometimes, attacks just wouldn't work or you just can't use healing items until you leave and jump back in.
The problem is much bigger than this though as, if Ebenezer and the Invisible World had no bugs whatsoever, it would still be a chore to play through and fundamentally lost on what makes a good Metroidvania game. It functions okay when exploring and discovering new mechanics but never does so organically. It ticks off all the boxes you may look for in a Metroidvania without the charm and creativity that has let this genre shine.
Ebenezer and the Invisible World is stuck in the past, broken in the present and I sure hope it doesn't represent our future.
A code was given for the purposes of critique