Media in Review: Eternights
Eternights is...a lot. It ostensibly is trying to be an action game fused with a dating sim, half Devil May Cry, half Persona, but it's honestly not very good at either? The action half is just plain bad; the lighting is awful and most stages blend into color soup or are too dark to see anything, enemies constantly attack from off-screen, you can barely get a combo string off without being in a perfect dodge... It just feels terrible to play, all around.
The social side fares better in comparison, although it's still not really good per se. It is a functional, if not particularly interesting, clone of Persona's S-Links. You spend time with them, you rank up and unlock new stat boosts and abilities, pass a stat check near the end, and kiss them if you so desire. There's a lot more of a romantic bent to it, considering that this half of the game is a dating sim, but it mostly accomplishes what it sets out to do, in stark contrast to the action side of things. My favorite little touch here is that you can go out and scavenge at night, in an attempt to pick up supplies and get some minor stat boosts with a character, and there are some deep cuts once you get far enough into these item lists. It's genuinely quite funny when an otherwise demure and sweet girl tells you "Oh good, that's the kind of whip I was looking for" or you get back and half the porn mags you picked up are missing.
To its credit(?), Eternights was a one-man production for the vast majority of its development time, and the fact that it exists at all is mildly impressive. Two additional team members were brought in during the last few months (one writer, one level designer), and while the level design still isn't very good, it is extremely obvious when the secondary writer was given control of the plot. Eternights as a whole is a very goofy, irreverent game, and while its shitpost game is strong, it tends to fall flat on its face when it tries to be serious. The exception to this is Yohan, the game's sole male love interest, who has the most complete character arc, by far the most chemistry with the main character, and actual stakes the in the plot. I don't know if it was ever confirmed that the secondary writer reworked Yohan's stuff, but it is of such a higher quality that it's almost impossible to not make that connection.
Eternights is the kind of heavily flawed passion project that's hard not to root for, but on an objective level, it's not very good. Half of its core gameplay is awful, and the other half is filled with little stumbling points that lead to a death by a thousand cuts. It is a prime example of "You could take this game from a 6/10 to an 8/10 with almost no effort whatsoever," and while I would be interested to see what their second game looks like, it's going to take a lot of convincing to make me take the plunge again.