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Why Everyone Hates It: Those who have played Eversion have a tendency to fixate on the fact that over the course of the game, it shifts from an upbeat, kid friendly aesthetic to being set in a nightmare world of clawing arms and shadowy fang filled maws. Not wanting to spoil the transition between the two extremes, the core game mechanic is rarely discussed, and the whole thing comes off as just a cheap gimmick.
Legitimate Issues With the Game: In the style of an NES game, Eversion is for the most part a very simple and relatively brief platformer, whose controls are restricted to moving left, moving right, jumping, and "everting." A special action usable only in certain places, generally to solve problems. It also does indeed have a fair share of jump scares and creepy affectations as it goes on.
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Why I Like It Anyway: Eversion is one of those games which takes a single simple premise, wrings all the interesting implementations it can from it, and has the good sense not to overstay it's welcome afterwards, not unlike Portal or Braid. In this case, the gimmick is the limited ability to crank the horror vibe of the game up or down, altering the behavior of various elements of the game. Even without this gimmick, it's also rather impressively solid as a retro platformer, with a nice difficulty curve.
Superficially, the game initially looks like a shameless clone of Super Mario Bros. Little goomba-like enemies wander about in roughly the same fashion, friendly-faced blocks when bumped from below spit out gems to be collected, increasing a generally vestigial score counter, and not only is the first level clearly an homage to that of Super Mario Bros., it even says 1-1 in the corner. In this case however, the -1 does not refer to it the first level of the first level grouping, but rather the current horror-level, from 1 to 8. As the horror level rises, the music and visual style change, becoming more ominous and less lively from levels 1 to 4, then more blatantly horrific from 5-8.
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The real significance of this is the practical effect it has on the environment. Clouds, which are merely a background decoration at horror level 1, become thick enough to serve as platforms at level 2. Trees, usually serving as solid obstacles, at one point lose their leaves, making it possible to walk past. Further cranking the difficulty however turns them into deadly spike covered clusters of vines. Bricks become cracked and brittle, allowing them to be smashed Mario style, then later become so unstable they fall away when stepped on. In order to reach every gem and unlock the proper ending, shifting up and down along the full range in creative ways is often required.
Of course, the catch to this is that one cannot cycle through the various horror levels at will. The evert button does nothing unless standing in particular locations, indicated by the background color and music of the destination bleeding through slightly while standing in the correct spot, and even then only toggles between a particular pair of adjacent levels. Later puzzles frequently involve traversing back and forth across a level, slowly increasing or decreasing the horror level to a particular point to access a single stubborn gem. There are also a number of points where, for atmosphere's sake, the game will throw a curveball, using a one-way eversion point, or spontaneously spiking the level up out of the blue, in one case in a rather blatant hat tip to the obscure NES game Monster Party.
Higher horror levels tend to bring more extreme degrees of challenge as well, with advancing walls of doom, giant hands reaching out of pits, and fast moving airborn obstacles. To accompany the higher rate of death, level title cards also begin to flash various grim and demoralizing messages, which honestly serve as a nice amusing diversion when stuck on a particularly difficult challenge.
While an updated shinier version of Eversion now exists, the original version was and is a freeware Windows game, available from the developer's site.
