Uploaded December 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago

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A playthrough of Renovation's 1992 action game for the Sega Genesis, Earnest Evans.

Have you ever been really into a game that was clearly subpar? One that, in spite of its adamant refusal to live up to its potential in any meaningful way, drew you in? That's how I feel about Earnest Evans (and much of Telenet's work).

Earnest Evans, an earnest Indiana Jones impersonator, has been asked by his grandfather to scour the globe for three idols that, in the wrong hands, could summon an evil intent on consuming the world.

The adventure is a twelve stage world tour that includes pit stops in Mexico, Peru, "Europe," Belgium, Mongolia, and Arizona, all of which involve involve wildly flailing a whip about as you're being assailed by an army of stuff - gangsters, animals, Cthulu monstrosities, faulty programming routines, etc. - that wants you dead.

Earnest Evans, the follow-up to El Viento, is an action-platformer that's best known for its hilariously awkward approach to character animation. Earnest and his foes are all constructed from groups of tethered sprites that can move independently to give their motion a sense of fluidity, similar to how Treasure built the bosses in Gunstar Heroes.

The game is impressively smooth in motion, but it's also impressively stupid looking, and the character rigging constantly interferes with the controls. The individual sprites making up Earnest's body don't coordinate properly, and the collision boxes wreak havoc on his ability to get around. He trips over seams in the floor tiles, sinks through ledges, and launches himself into rocket-propelled somersaults without rhyme or reason. It's a game with a lot of ambition behind it, but the tech that drives it is pretty raw.

Those sorts of problems have outright killed "better" games, but not Earnest Evans. Not for me, at least. Rather, they're the source of the game's charm. It's a mess, but I doubt I'd have liked it half as much if it all worked as intended. It took some real effort to learn how to wrangle Earnest's movements effectively (and I never figured out how to reliably latch on to things every time with the whip), but once I figured it all out, I found myself having a ton of fun figuring out how to get through each area.

The art is nice - in screenshots, it's a handsome game - and the music is as catchy and dramatic as you'd expect from anything bearing Motoi Sakuraba's name. It's a shame that the US version was cut down to fit on a cartridge, though. The original Japanese CD version had a killer Redbook soundtrack, and its cutscenes explained what was going on between each stage.

Earnest Evans is an ambitious game that falls flat on its face, but I find it difficult to hate on a game that tries this hard and looks this goofy doing it. It lives up to its name. It's nothing if not earnest.

(And poor guy, imagine how bad the infestation must've been for his parents to have named him that!)
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No cheats were used during the recording of this video.

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