Game Review: The Eternal Castle (REMASTERED)
2019-Jun-04, Tuesday 20:13![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dorchadas
The Eternal Castle first came to my attention at the end of last year when the developers posted a trailer. I watched and thought it was rad as hell with a bitchin' synthwave soundtrack, so I immediately put it up on Facebook with a comment about how excited I was for it. ![[facebook.com profile]](https://www.facebook.com/favicon.ico)
shane.suydam watched it and had a similar opinion, and he immediately bought it. And then he bought a copy for me as well, so full disclosure, I received a copy of this game for free from a friend for the purpose of bathing in the cyan and magenta glow.
The game claims to be a remastered version of an old 1987 game the devs played and half-remember from their childhoods, but that's all marketing copy. The game is supposedly from 1987, but that's the year that VGA was introduced and CGA was long out of fashion by then. I mean, the EGA version of Quest for Glory I is from 1989. So is Prince of Persia, which is clearly one of the major inspirations for The Eternal Castle's gameplay. The opening faked-up "boot screen" is stylized as a DOS sequence but occasionally uses a Linux command. None of that backstory matters to the gameplay, but some people got lost chasing down a bit of cheeky humor from the devs, so I thought I should bring it up.
So close and yet so far.
The Eternal Castle is like if an old IBM CGA game was somehow made today, with fluid 60 fps animations and in 1080p. The color palette is never more than four colors, but the game does an amazing job of using contrast to highlight important areas and set the mood. From the opening movie where the main character takes a shuttle down from a space station(?) to the planet's surface, and the surroundings turn from the black of space to the slowly-growing heat of atmospheric re-entry, to the point where the shuttle almost touches down before being shot out of the sky in a burst of magenta flames, the use of color is top-notch. Patches of shadow in an abandoned laboratory, the brilliant explosions from the walking mines in the castle itself, the flickering light around the protagonist as they crawl through an abandoned sewer...it looks gorgeous. Each stage generally has its own set color palette, the better to differentiate the challenges and requirements of each area, but there's a sequence in the Unholy Lab involving mad science that uses a shifting palette to excellent effect.
CGA is before my time, but I've played a CGA game (Wizard's Crown) and plenty of Apple II games before. I appreciate what the developers were able to do with a few colors and simple shapes that could evoke the player's imagination. Limitations breed creativity.
That said, there's one thing that I'm decidedly not nostalgic for and that's the control scheme. In the credits, the developers' give special thanks to Jordan Mechner (Prince of Persia) and Eric Chahi (Another World), and The Eternal Castle's controls and gameplay are clearly based on those kind of momentum platformers. People who played those games will probably be far more used to the timing of jumps and the way the protagonist takes a moment to start running, hits walls and falls over, and slows to a stop before spinning around and moving in the other direction. I'm not one of those people, though, since I grew up on games like Super Mario Bros 3, so the controls seemed extremely muddy to me. I was constantly frustrated by missing jumps, slamming into walls, taking one step too far and being eviscerated by a trap, and otherwise not having my character exactly where I wanted them. These are part of the intended play experience, but for me it felt like bad design.
Then again, a lot of that was because I played three-quarters of the game with the keyboard before I tried using a controller.
I supposed in some ways I got the true experience, authentic to the inspirations, but really it just means I'm probably never going to play Prince of Persia now.
I can already tell they won't be friendly.
Beyond the basics, the gameplay involves searching through four areas for pieces of the shuttle that crashes at the beginning of the game in order to retrieve four GLIDER[sic] parts and fix the shuttle, so that the protagonist can reach the eponymous Eternal Castle. Each stage is a different environment with different art and color choices. The first place I went after making my way through the opening stage was the Unholy Lab, with a graveyard outside patrolled by ghouls and wild dogs and where I had to sneak past a lot of the enemies by hiding in the pools of shadow left by the sparse lighting. This was a definite contrast to the Forgotten City, where two armies fought each other among the ruins and I mowed down enemy soldiers with an assault rifle. Descriptions and context were as minimalist as the graphics, so I approached every situation cautiously, unsure if it was dangerous. After spending time in the Unholy Lab, the trap-filled Ancient City was a shocking change of pace because I wasn't used to the environment killing me. Previously it was the ghouls that were the threat.
While it's possible to beat the game using solely kung-fu, weapons are a major part of the game since the primary way of interacting with other people is by killing them. There's a variety of weapons from guns to axes to grenades to an electro-sword, it's possible to hold two weapons at once--thanks to the order I did the stages, I didn't learn this until almost the end of the game--and weapons are discarded when out of ammo. Obviously axes don't run out of ammo but throwing them at a distant enemy with a gun is a viable strategy, so melee weapons are just as disposable as guns. Combat is mostly button mashing, though stamina management is important. Running out of stamina means the protagonist wearily swings in the same predictable pattern, whereas going into a fight fresh creates a flurry of blows that knock enemies around like bowling pins. That said, I rarely needed to care about stamina in the moment and I can't think of any fight where running out of stamina meant I lost. Even in the one sequence where stamina should be vital, where the protagonist is chasing a man holding a GLIDER fragment across a series of rooftops while an attack helicopter fires on both them, I never had to care about the stamina gauge. I'm honestly not sure why it's even in the game.
It's capitalized so it must be true.
The plot is deliberately vague, not helped by all the text in the game being very low-rez. There's an initial screen filled with text that I thought was just a pretty design for a moment until I noticed a word or two and then settled down to decipher it. A networked, globalized civilization collapses and some portion of humanity flees to space, leaving everyone else to devolve into warring bands. The space colonies make raids for supplies to the surface, but one of those raids didn't return and the protagonist goes after her.
There's also a secret ending, found by collecting a bunch of additional GLIDER fragments throughout the game, but I didn't get it. The very first fragment is to the left of the crash site at the very beginning and by the time I even knew what the fragments were, I had missed it with no ability to backtrack. That said, the secret ending doesn't really explain anything more than the standard ending does. The standard ending has no explosion and no sudden VGA enhancement, but the protagonist and the AI still go back into space. End of line.
SAVE HER
Eternal Castle had a fantastic aesthetic, but I didn't actually have that much fun playing it. I bought the soundtrack months ago, and tracks like Chase on the Roofs or The Mortal Scientist stuck in my head and really got me hyped for the game. I watched the trailer at least a dozen times. The game looks and sounds great, it looks even better in motion than it does in still images, and the developers should be proud of what they accomplished in terms of creating an old DOS game with modern sensibilities. But I feel like most of what's interesting about it can be found by watching a longplay like this one.
But I'm not sure how much of that is on me. I have very little attachment to games like Prince of Persia or Another World, or to their successor games like the Oddworld games. I'm used to stopping on a dime, changing directions in midair, and otherwise obeying video game physics. If I had played more momentum platformers I might have had more fun playing and I can't blame the game for that. The developers created the game they wanted, and it's an...
Well, an excellent example of the genre.
The game claims to be a remastered version of an old 1987 game the devs played and half-remember from their childhoods, but that's all marketing copy. The game is supposedly from 1987, but that's the year that VGA was introduced and CGA was long out of fashion by then. I mean, the EGA version of Quest for Glory I is from 1989. So is Prince of Persia, which is clearly one of the major inspirations for The Eternal Castle's gameplay. The opening faked-up "boot screen" is stylized as a DOS sequence but occasionally uses a Linux command. None of that backstory matters to the gameplay, but some people got lost chasing down a bit of cheeky humor from the devs, so I thought I should bring it up.
So close and yet so far.
The Eternal Castle is like if an old IBM CGA game was somehow made today, with fluid 60 fps animations and in 1080p. The color palette is never more than four colors, but the game does an amazing job of using contrast to highlight important areas and set the mood. From the opening movie where the main character takes a shuttle down from a space station(?) to the planet's surface, and the surroundings turn from the black of space to the slowly-growing heat of atmospheric re-entry, to the point where the shuttle almost touches down before being shot out of the sky in a burst of magenta flames, the use of color is top-notch. Patches of shadow in an abandoned laboratory, the brilliant explosions from the walking mines in the castle itself, the flickering light around the protagonist as they crawl through an abandoned sewer...it looks gorgeous. Each stage generally has its own set color palette, the better to differentiate the challenges and requirements of each area, but there's a sequence in the Unholy Lab involving mad science that uses a shifting palette to excellent effect.
CGA is before my time, but I've played a CGA game (Wizard's Crown) and plenty of Apple II games before. I appreciate what the developers were able to do with a few colors and simple shapes that could evoke the player's imagination. Limitations breed creativity.
That said, there's one thing that I'm decidedly not nostalgic for and that's the control scheme. In the credits, the developers' give special thanks to Jordan Mechner (Prince of Persia) and Eric Chahi (Another World), and The Eternal Castle's controls and gameplay are clearly based on those kind of momentum platformers. People who played those games will probably be far more used to the timing of jumps and the way the protagonist takes a moment to start running, hits walls and falls over, and slows to a stop before spinning around and moving in the other direction. I'm not one of those people, though, since I grew up on games like Super Mario Bros 3, so the controls seemed extremely muddy to me. I was constantly frustrated by missing jumps, slamming into walls, taking one step too far and being eviscerated by a trap, and otherwise not having my character exactly where I wanted them. These are part of the intended play experience, but for me it felt like bad design.
Then again, a lot of that was because I played three-quarters of the game with the keyboard before I tried using a controller.
I supposed in some ways I got the true experience, authentic to the inspirations, but really it just means I'm probably never going to play Prince of Persia now.I can already tell they won't be friendly.
Beyond the basics, the gameplay involves searching through four areas for pieces of the shuttle that crashes at the beginning of the game in order to retrieve four GLIDER[sic] parts and fix the shuttle, so that the protagonist can reach the eponymous Eternal Castle. Each stage is a different environment with different art and color choices. The first place I went after making my way through the opening stage was the Unholy Lab, with a graveyard outside patrolled by ghouls and wild dogs and where I had to sneak past a lot of the enemies by hiding in the pools of shadow left by the sparse lighting. This was a definite contrast to the Forgotten City, where two armies fought each other among the ruins and I mowed down enemy soldiers with an assault rifle. Descriptions and context were as minimalist as the graphics, so I approached every situation cautiously, unsure if it was dangerous. After spending time in the Unholy Lab, the trap-filled Ancient City was a shocking change of pace because I wasn't used to the environment killing me. Previously it was the ghouls that were the threat.
While it's possible to beat the game using solely kung-fu, weapons are a major part of the game since the primary way of interacting with other people is by killing them. There's a variety of weapons from guns to axes to grenades to an electro-sword, it's possible to hold two weapons at once--thanks to the order I did the stages, I didn't learn this until almost the end of the game--and weapons are discarded when out of ammo. Obviously axes don't run out of ammo but throwing them at a distant enemy with a gun is a viable strategy, so melee weapons are just as disposable as guns. Combat is mostly button mashing, though stamina management is important. Running out of stamina means the protagonist wearily swings in the same predictable pattern, whereas going into a fight fresh creates a flurry of blows that knock enemies around like bowling pins. That said, I rarely needed to care about stamina in the moment and I can't think of any fight where running out of stamina meant I lost. Even in the one sequence where stamina should be vital, where the protagonist is chasing a man holding a GLIDER fragment across a series of rooftops while an attack helicopter fires on both them, I never had to care about the stamina gauge. I'm honestly not sure why it's even in the game.
It's capitalized so it must be true.
The plot is deliberately vague, not helped by all the text in the game being very low-rez. There's an initial screen filled with text that I thought was just a pretty design for a moment until I noticed a word or two and then settled down to decipher it. A networked, globalized civilization collapses and some portion of humanity flees to space, leaving everyone else to devolve into warring bands. The space colonies make raids for supplies to the surface, but one of those raids didn't return and the protagonist goes after her.
NO MATTER WHATIt's unclear how much of the game is actually happening and how much of it is a cyberspace hallucination. The save points are meditation stones, and dying and respawning is conceived as diving into the remnants of full-immersion internet and predicting the future using VR simulation, such that the protagonist has never actually died at the end of the game, they've merely simulated dozens of deaths. And due to the corrupted internet, maybe their victory never happened either. The game's New Game+ mode is framed as being played entirely "awake," which in practice means permadeath. Even though the game is only a couple hours long, I had enough trouble with the controls that I'm never going to do that, but I appreciate that there's a narrative explanation for saving and loading and why New Game+ exists.
I'M GOING TO SAVE HER_
There's also a secret ending, found by collecting a bunch of additional GLIDER fragments throughout the game, but I didn't get it. The very first fragment is to the left of the crash site at the very beginning and by the time I even knew what the fragments were, I had missed it with no ability to backtrack. That said, the secret ending doesn't really explain anything more than the standard ending does. The standard ending has no explosion and no sudden VGA enhancement, but the protagonist and the AI still go back into space. End of line.
SAVE HER
Eternal Castle had a fantastic aesthetic, but I didn't actually have that much fun playing it. I bought the soundtrack months ago, and tracks like Chase on the Roofs or The Mortal Scientist stuck in my head and really got me hyped for the game. I watched the trailer at least a dozen times. The game looks and sounds great, it looks even better in motion than it does in still images, and the developers should be proud of what they accomplished in terms of creating an old DOS game with modern sensibilities. But I feel like most of what's interesting about it can be found by watching a longplay like this one.
But I'm not sure how much of that is on me. I have very little attachment to games like Prince of Persia or Another World, or to their successor games like the Oddworld games. I'm used to stopping on a dime, changing directions in midair, and otherwise obeying video game physics. If I had played more momentum platformers I might have had more fun playing and I can't blame the game for that. The developers created the game they wanted, and it's an...
Well, an excellent example of the genre.
no subject
Date: 2019-Jun-05, Wednesday 02:25 (UTC)I've never played any momentum platformers, so I probably wouldn't enjoy it, either.
no subject
Date: 2019-Jun-05, Wednesday 14:19 (UTC)I did the same thing with Another World. I've seen multiple longplays of the game, but I've never gotten further than the first time the protagonist is captured. It's a foundational game and it looks great, but I didn't find playing it that fun.
no subject
Date: 2019-Jun-08, Saturday 12:13 (UTC)That imagery takes me back to... well, days of Defender of the Crown, Sword of Aragon, Ultima IV, and the like.
no subject
Date: 2019-Jun-10, Monday 01:45 (UTC)I was surprised how effectively the game worked its aesthetic. 1080p CGA isn't something I'd ever have thought I wanted before, but having seen it in action, I'd play a lot more games in this style.
Maybe I'd be happier with old-school CRPGs, though.
no subject
Date: 2019-Jun-10, Monday 12:43 (UTC)http://rpgreview.net/files/rpgreview_42.pdf