Although we continue to see a good handful of proposals for survival games, there was a time when this genre was revitalized and took center stage in the monthly release list. Now the volume of releases of this type of game is a little lower, but if we look at the independent scene we continue to see interesting proposals within this genre. Join me in my analysis of Eternal.
Today we are talking about a title that not only deals with the survival genre but also has touches of other types of games. We tell you what we thought of the work of the independent studio Vanimals, Eternal. Launched in The format Early Access in October 2021the past On December 7, version 1.0 was releasedand we tell you what we thought about it.
To survive one more day
We insist that this will not be the only genre addressed by the game, but its most important element is the survival game, in which you will have to collect all kinds of materials to be able to live another day.
The story of Eternal we place like Angling and Cody, mother and son They are involved in a zombie apocalypse and our main mission will be to survive. In the gameplay we will only control the mother, but we will have to interact with our son to, in addition to taking care of him and protecting him (feed him, drink him, watch for possible injuries, etc.), all of him learning necessary to survive. Because there will come a day when we will no longer be there, since when fleeing to the area where the game takes place, a zombie will bite us and we will be infected, without knowing how much time we have left.
It will therefore be vital to teach our son everything what we do, in order to learn new skills that allow us to survive longer and better. Of course, I recognize that the game doesn’t make it clear from the start that we have to teach our son everything we do.
Search, collect and repeat
We had already assumed a few hours after the start that our mission would be to search for the necessary materials to be able to craft/craft objects that would allow us to live another day. But I must say that This mechanic ends up becoming somewhat repetitiveas the seek-get-craft cycle repeats itself very frequently and can end up taking its toll after spending a few hours in the game.
We will also have small doses of management from the different banks to craft items, medicine, food, etc. They can also be expanded and improved, allowing us to obtain benefits such as more storage space or new items to create.
To finish and add a little variety to the main core, you also need manage our skillsthat we will be able to develop and improve them through our own exploration of the world and the teaching we give to our child (just hold down a button while we perform the relevant action we want to teach him).
The dangers of being away from home
From the first moment you will be safe in your home and it will serve as a base for resting, eating, etc. But as is normal, We will have to get out of our “comfort zone”
And as expected, the world will be infested with zombies They will come after us to give us a bite to feed their appetite. That is why we will also have the possibility of fighting with the weapons that we find (in the least cases) or with which we make. Thus, we will have to resort to this pipe or this bat to get rid of the first zombies that we encounter, making the game more complicated later and facing more formidable enemies.
Although it is true that The game offers us the opportunity to explore these scenarios stealthily, crouching and trying to go unnoticed, in my opinion the stealth doesn’t work very well, and its implementation leaves something to be desired, giving the impression that the developers made it this way to give that feeling of helplessness and to ultimately have to resort to fighting. Fight that can end in injuries requiring medication. Medicines that require equipment to manufacture. And so the virtuous cycle begins again, and we repeat the aforementioned search and collection mechanisms.
And technically and visually…
The game right now available only on PC and its requirements are acceptable for almost all current PCs. Furthermore, It is fully compatible with Steam Deckand this is where I played almost the entire game. Its performance does not require any additional tuning and works perfectly on the Valve device.
We received the key before version 1.0 was released and I must say that, before the big update which led to its final launchthe game featured big problems with subtitles. Even choosing Spanish, it was more Italian and English that we saw on screen. With version 1.0 this has been fixed and we have not seen these types of errors. I also have to say that with the release of version 1.0, all the progress accumulated in the story during this period has been erased. I don’t know if it was just in my case or if it was something general, but we understand that this doesn’t happen in the majority of releases from early access to final release.
Visually, the game uses a low poly which seemed more than correct to me and the animations, as well as the cutscenes, fulfill their function of depicting the raw story of a mother and a son that will not leave us indifferent.
Ultimately, Undying…
Although playable too much use of research and collection of materials, on a story level, we will come to sympathize with Angling and feel responsible for our son, and how we would do everything possible for him and his well-being. With a certain feeling of repetition, Eternal It remains a good game to which elements of classic survival mechanics are added which provide a very slight variety.and whose strong point is the mother-son relationship and the difficult choices that we will sometimes have to make.
Eternal
Pro.
- Eye-catching visual style
- The mother-son relationship
Contra.
- it ends up getting repetitive
- Little innovation
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