Evercade Nexus is out, and Banjo-Kazooie in the box is why it finally has analogue sticks

For six years, Evercade has made one stubborn argument: a game is worth more when you can hold it. Blaze Entertainment built its platform around the plastic cartridge, the printed manual and the shelf, while the rest of the industry was turning libraries into licences. What the platform could not do was reach past a certain era. Without an analogue stick, the generation that taught players to steer a camera and roam a world stayed largely out of reach.

The Evercade Nexus, now on sale, is Blaze’s answer to that limit, and its pack-in cartridge makes the case better than any spec sheet. Every console ships with Rare’s Banjo-Kazooie and its sequel Banjo-Tooie, two platformers whose whole design rests on a thumb on a stick: a bear and a bird circling a jigsaw piece while the camera swings behind them, in worlds built to be explored at an angle. Blaze says the pair were built from Rare’s original source code, the kind of custodial detail this platform has always sold on.

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The hardware has grown around that ambition. The Nexus has a 5.89-inch IPS screen, the largest Evercade has fitted, rated at more than 500 nits, plus dual analogue sticks, the D-pad, rear bumpers and triggers. Blaze pitches the sticks at 32- and 64-bit games. The black body weighs 410 grams and carries a customisable RGB logo.

The cartridge slot still sits at the centre of the idea. Evercade now counts more than 80 cartridges and over 700 games, organised like curated anthologies: the catalogue of a publisher such as Activision, Taito or Rare, or the history of a series like Tomb Raider, Duke Nukem, Legacy of Kain or Doom, each boxed with a full-colour manual. In the announcement, Blaze CEO Andrew Byatt frames the console as the sum of that philosophy: “great games, physical ownership and the joy of discovering something new.”

The most interesting addition is EverSync, which turns the cartridge’s limit into a social trick. Two Nexus consoles link directly, without WiFi or an internet connection, and share one game so each player sees it on their own screen, even if only one of them owns the cartridge. It is local multiplayer in the old sense: two people in a room, one cart between them.

Returning features include TATE mode, which turns the screen vertical for upright arcade shooters, display-ratio and scanline options, a library that tracks the cartridges you own, and wireless updates that bring extras such as the Indie Heroes Game of the Month.

The Evercade Nexus launched on 30 October at £169.99, $199.99 or €199.99 through Amazon, Funstock, Best Buy, GameStop and other Evercade retailers in Europe and the US. The box holds the console, the Banjo-Kazooie Double Pack, a USB-C cable and a quick start guide; a mains adaptor is not included. A hard-shell case for six cartridges and a screen protector kit are sold separately. The handheld was first unveiled at the end of March.

Whether the stick opens Evercade to the rest of the late-nineties canon depends on which licences Blaze can secure next. The launch cartridge already says where the platform wants to go: out of the side-scroller and into worlds you walk around in, still carried on a cartridge.

Tags: Andrew Byatt, Banjo-Kazooie, Banjo-Tooie, Blaze Entertainment, Evercade, Evercade Nexus

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