Everlast: Undying Tale Review – Being Undead Is Hard Work

Everlast: Undying Tale is an interesting choice for players who enjoy old-school MMORPG progression. If you’re perfectly okay with spending an afternoon mining ore or improving a crafting skill rather than fighting monsters, then this could be right up your alley. Developer InSpades combines those familiar systems with real-time combat, a colorful fantasy world, and the option to play entirely alone. Let’s talk about everything that could keep us occupied as an undead adventurer, along with all the unpleasant complications that come with being one, right after the trailer jump!

A Second Chance at Life

Our adventure takes place in Sarkis, a fantasy world where ancient magic has caused the dead to rise. We begin as an aspiring adventurer whose promising career comes to an unfortunate end when we die before accomplishing much of anything. A mysterious being suddenly decides we’re worth resurrecting, although our second chance comes with a curse that changes our character.

Despite all the undead creatures wandering around, Sarkis is a surprisingly cheerful-looking place. Its cartoon-inspired visual style makes the settlements and surrounding countryside look like they’ve been pulled straight out of a storybook. At least, that’s what we initially thought. Then we ventured into places such as the Great Graveyard and the Southern Swamps. Trust us when we say that those places revealed a considerably less welcoming side of the world.

The opening introduces us to the fundamentals through relatively ordinary tasks, including gathering wood, mining ore, preparing food, and making equipment. As people who’ve played plenty of games like these, we couldn’t shake that familiar been-there-done-that feeling. However, once we’re free to explore, there’s no shortage of fun activities to keep us occupied, especially when fighting comes into play.

Fighting the Good Fight

Combat takes place in real time, with light and heavy attacks consuming stamina. We can defend ourselves by blocking, parrying incoming blows, or dodging out of danger. Special abilities expand our options, although their cooldowns and stamina requirements prevent us from relying on them too heavily. There’s a considerable selection of weapons, from ordinary swords and axes to spears, bows, and magical equipment. Each has different characteristics, and the developers have implemented stagger mechanics that allow successful attacks to interrupt smaller enemies. Larger creatures are more resistant to interruptions, so the same approach definitely didn’t work against everything we encountered.

Inspired by classic MMORPGs, we aren’t restricted to a particular class, and our abilities improve through use. Spending time with a sword develops the relevant combat skill, while practicing sorcery increases our proficiency with magic. Equipment also has skill requirements, so, as they say, all in good time. Every time we got our hands on a powerful weapon and discovered that our Dexterity, for example, wasn’t high enough to equip it, we had to close our eyes and count to ten. Being a talented blacksmith doesn’t automatically make us a talented swordsman. Which, to be fair, makes total sense. It didn’t hurt any less, though.

More Than Fighting

There’s an enormous emphasis on gathering resources and improving non-combat skills, so be prepared to spend plenty of time mining, a little time fishing, a smidgen of time cooking, and perhaps a few more hours woodworking or forging. The cool thing is that each skill unlocks additional possibilities as it develops. Mining provides materials for equipment, while gathering wood supports various crafting activities. Fishing gives us ingredients for cooking, allowing us to prepare meals that can make some of the more challenging encounters a little easier. Progression is closely tied to these activities because better equipment and certain quest objectives require specific skill levels.

Crafting also includes a Focused Craft minigame, where our performance influences the quality of the finished item. If we’d rather avoid repeating the minigame, we can use automatic crafting, even spending additional materials to improve our chances of producing higher-quality equipment. It’s great that we have an option like this. What’s not so great, however, is the inventory.

Our standard backpack has 30 slots, with specialized pouches providing additional storage for particular item categories. An ore sack, for example, helps accommodate materials collected while mining, while other pouches are designed for food or reagents. As you can probably guess, these restrictions make planning our gathering trips worthwhile. The limited capacity, however, also means frequent visits to storage, something we weren’t particularly fond of.

Undead Troubles

Our resurrection introduces the Curse system, which affects almost everything we do. A meter fills as we engage in certain activities, including fighting and gathering resources. As the Curse progresses, unpleasant effects begin appearing, including, for example, vulnerability to water. Allowing the meter to fill completely causes periodic health loss, making an otherwise harmless activity potentially dangerous.

Fortunately, we can fight back. Ichor obtained from certain enemies can help reduce the Curse, while special totems discovered through gathering activities can also be purified. Completing quests increases our Humanity, which helps us resist the Curse’s effects. There are benefits to our undead condition, too, and after a while, we learned to embrace both the good and the bad. We didn’t necessarily want to get rid of every trace of the Curse. After all, learning to live with it is part of the experience.

Speaking of unpleasant complications, death has consequences beyond the Curse itself. Depending on the selected difficulty, we can lose items from our backpack and must recover them, with some available for free and others requiring payment. Harsher settings introduce considerably more severe penalties, including permanent character death. We hate this in games, and it’s sadly why we stopped playing Dune: Awakening after more than 50 hours of playtime. When that worm got us and we lost so many cool things, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to carry on. Even now, thinking about everything we lost makes us a little miserable.

Beyond the Starting Village

While exploring, we travel through handcrafted regions containing settlements, dangerous wilderness, and caves. Oh, and we also come across plenty of characters who have problems that only an adventurer can solve. We want to point out that not every quest follows the same structure, though. In one quest, we discovered an injured soldier at the bottom of the Abyss. After treating his broken leg, we helped him escape the dangerous mineshaft. One possible approach involved using a fire ability to open a shortcut past the spider caves, while another involved providing powder. We liked how our abilities and the items we’d prepared could influence the way we approached an objective.

Another quest had us accompany a dude into a graveyard to destroy an altar responsible for raising the dead. We had to protect him as enemies attacked, although bringing friends along was also an option. Meanwhile, another quest introduced us to a network of magical stones that eventually allowed us to travel more conveniently between distant locations. We had a great time working through these quests. As you can see, the devs have tried to come up with a system that requires more than simply hunting down enemies.

Beyond these individual adventures, we can participate in shared events or help rebuild ruined parts of Sarkis. The Desolate Zones system revolves around contributing resources towards permanent improvements, such as repairing a broken bridge or restoring useful crafting facilities. We can also work towards rebuilding our own estate.

Public servers accommodate up to 100 players, but none of this requires a large group. We can create a private world, join friends, or experience the adventure alone. We particularly enjoyed our solo playthrough, especially because solo players benefit from reduced requirements for shared events and restoration projects. We also deeply appreciated the custom single-player settings, which allow us to adjust experience gains, gathering rates, and loot rates. Unlike many games that punish us for playing solo or force us into a longer grind, Everlast: Undying Tale lets us make the experience more accommodating. If we’d rather spend our time exploring or completing quests than gathering resources for hours, we can adjust the settings accordingly. We wish more games offered this level of flexibility.

Still Finding Its Feet?

Our score: Early Access Title

• Developer: InSpades
• Publisher: InSpades
• Platforms: PC (Windows, macOS, Linux)
• Release: October 28, 2026 (Early Access)
• Genre: Open-world action RPG / MMO-lite
• Modes: Single-player, online co-op, multiplayer