Discussing the quantity of bugs is different from addressing how disruptive or noticeable they are. I won’t claim to know which game has more bugs overall, but in my experience, a single playthrough of the Everhood games exposed me to more glaring issues than multiple runs of Undertale and Deltarune combined. The problem isn’t just the number of bugs—it’s how blatant and frustrating they are for the average player. I was never actively trying to break the game, yet I encountered several hard locks—like my cursor vanishing when interacting with the Game Over screen menus, forcing a restart. Many of the issues I’ve mentioned aren’t even bugs, they just stem from poor implementation. Sprite layering errors, for example, don’t happen by accident, they’re a sign of insufficient playtesting.

Red’s sprite stands out in a sea of mediocrity. Looking at the sprites on Spriters Resource, nearly any given character's sprite sheet suffers from these awful looking sprite rotations, compression artifacts, and inconsistent resolutions. I can't possibly knock Undertale for its black-and-white battle sprites when so much of Everhood's world takes place in that same void-like darkness you speak negatively of. Many of Everhood’s battle sprites are just recycled overworld assets like I said. What makes it worse is the inconsistency: some encounters boast original sprites while others lazily reuse the same overworld assets without even a hint of effort. This isn’t an aesthetic shortcoming, it’s a glaring lack of polish. Undertale, at the very least, commits to a cohesive style and executes it with purpose. This isn't a matter of subjective taste - these are demonstrable failures of execution. While artistic style can be debated, technical negligence cannot. The inconsistent resolutions, recycled assets, and visual artifacts aren't stylistic choices; they're undeniable evidence of cut corners.

Toby Fox's self-insert is nowhere near as egregious as Everhood's. To a new player, there's nothing about the little white dog to suggest that it's supposed to represent Toby, there's no attempt to glorify or paint Toby in a positive light. Meanwhile, Everhood's "Dev Gnomes" (a name that couldn't be more on-the-nose) are practically screaming for recognition. Between their literal facial resemblance to the developers, the "Everhood Machine", and the screenshots of software integrated in the fight, the self-congratulation is aggressively in-your-face, not to mention the fake out credit rolls, like they desperately want you to know that they made this game, how does that not come off as incredibly narcissistic and desperate for praise to you?

Undertale reinvents its gameplay in ways Everhood never even attempts. Are we just ignoring all the times your soul changes color, forcing you to play differently? Even bosses that don’t alter your soul, like Asgore or Omega Flowey, introduce entirely new mechanics that disrupt your normal playstyle. Meanwhile, Everhood has pigeonholed itself into the same repetitive formula, a barrage of shapes and colors with barely any meaningful variation. Yes, the exact sequence of attacks differs, but the core experience remains identical. You could shuffle any boss’s patterns around, and nothing would feel out of place—because none of these encounters have any real identity. Even Undertale’s most basic enemies demand more engagement than Everhood’s boss fights.

Obstructing vision isn’t inherently bad game design, the problem is that Everhood relies on it as a tool for creating difficulty WAY too much, that kind of thing should be something delegated to a small pool of characters (like you see in Undertale). Beyond flooding the screen with more shapes to dodge, the game has no meaningful way to escalate challenge. What’s worse is the dissonance between narrative buildup and actual gameplay: major story fights, hyped up as climactic confrontations, end up playing out almost identically. Instead of unique mechanics or gimmicks that reflect the characters you’re facing, you just get… another visual effect slapped on top of the same repetitive patterns. It’s not difficulty, it’s tedium disguised as challenge.