Slick Retro Style - The Eternal Castle [Remastered]
The Eternal Castle is ostensibly a remake of a game from 1987 however all evidence points to that being a clever marketing ploy by the developers (forum post). Instead, it is an homage to the cinematic platformer, a genre including Prince of Persia and Oddworld. The Eternal Castle dusts off digital rotoscoping technology and uses retro, four colored environments to create oddly beautiful and expressive scenes. While the gameplay is not particularly smooth, the visuals and mystique of the world kept me engaged throughout The Eternal Castle.
The gameplay of The Eternal Castle leaves a lot to be desired. There was the problem of the unresponsive controls. I found that it was hard to get the character to do what you wanted them to. Attacks were slow and sometimes pressing the attack button would not do anything for no apparent reason. The character’s movement was imprecise, making it hard to jump up to the ledge you want to get to without leaping to your doom. It seems that there may be two explanations for this. It might be that this is a homage to older games with difficult control schemes. The Eternal Castle might have been attempting to emulate the feel as well as the look of the old cinematic platformers. On the other hand, it was likely also a frame rate issue. I happened to have a frame rate counter on the screen throughout my gameplay and it seems that the game is locked at eighteen frames per second, likely because that gives the game a retro feel. Regardless, the controls feel unresponsive and imprecise.
Combat, which is a major portion of The Eternal Castle is weak due to both the unresponsive controls that have been discussed and the chaotic nature of the art style. In one on one encounters the combat is adequate. You can see what is occurring and can generally deal with it. However, there are very few one-on-one encounters. When there are multiple opponents it quickly becomes difficult to keep track of your character and to tell what anyone is actually doing. Combat quickly devolves into a mass of incomprehensible movement. Most of the time I just mashed the attack button until I was the last one standing. The unresponsive controls often led to the awkward situation where you meant to hack a guys head open but your character did not do anything. Gunplay was generally better as long as you could draw and shoot before the enemy closed on you. That was harder then it sounds due to the weird controls. Despite these issues, combat was not a major drawback because the game tended to be easy enough for button mashing to get the job done. The ease of the game was for the best as the visuals were the main draw of The Eternal Castle.
Those visuals are quite gorgeous. Most of The Eternal Castle uses a four-color scheme of black, white, and two other colors. The visuals are haunting and often only give the player just enough information to recognize what is around them while leaving a lot to the imagination. Combining the abstract coloration with smooth rotoscope animation resulted in quite a few breathtaking scenes. I was genuinely surprised at how good this game looked given its simplistic coloration. Unfortunately, it’s not all good. The bright colors could be straining to the eyes and there were areas that incorporated aggressively flashing lights. The strobe effects were painful, to say nothing of epilepsy warnings, but were very rare throughout the game. In my opinion, the gorgeous art style makes up for the faults of the gameplay. This piece is more of an art project than a game project.
There is honestly little to no story in this game. At the beginning of the game, there is a backstory screen that is nigh unreadable. Luckily it can be read on the steam page, but the developers should have put a modicum of effort into making sure that the text was not a mess of jumbled characters. The start screen describes a stereotypical post-apocalyptic science fiction world of pollution and radiation with humanity scraping out a meager existence. In game, none of the areas are really explained. You get enough of an idea from the environment to piece together the gist of the world, but that is it. There is information released by the developer, but that information ends up reflecting old school gaming. It is flavor with little to no substance to it. Basically, do not expect a story that is much more complex than what you would find in Mario, because you will not find it here.
The big question is whether or not the wonky control schemes is bad enough to out-weight the great visuals. While the controls were quite bad and often confusing, I found that the game was usually easy enough to make up for the broken controls. So while you could not get into the control scheme, that did not interfere excessively with you experiencing the game and its great art. It comes down to what you are looking for in The Eternal Castle. If you are in it for a fun game to play, you should probably look elsewhere as you will be disappointed by the controls. If you are in it for the visuals then the gameplay is not bad enough to stop you from experiencing and enjoying the art. I enjoyed the game in spite of the controls because it looked so good. Consider what you are looking for and purchase accordingly.
Overall, The Eternal Castle is a beautiful art piece with bad gameplay attached to it. The controls are unresponsive and confusing. Combat often devolves into button mashing and it is often very hard to see what is actually happening. In the very least the game is easy enough to not have the terrible controls slow down your experience too much. The art is a beautiful mash of retro coloration and rotoscope animation. It can be hard on the eyes at times and has a couple of areas with excessively flashing lights that hurt and were a serious seizure risk. However, I found the overall aesthetics to be amazing. There is little to no story to the game, so do not look for that here. If you are looking for gameplay that is satisfying, I would recommend that you look elsewhere. The controls are far too bad for The Eternal Castle to be a satisfying play. However, if you are in it for the art of the game then this a good buy, especially on sale. I did not find that the gameplay hindered my appreciation of the visuals.
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