Eternights

It’s astonishing to me what game developers are able to do these days. Take a game like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. With modern technology and an army of skilled developers at their disposal, Nintendo crafted one of the biggest, most intricately designed games of this or any generation. They pulled off something that just wouldn’t have been possible in previous years. But as exciting as it is for me to think about what innovations might come from the AAA gaming space, what’s maybe even more exciting to me are the possibilities for indie games. Stardew Valley, for example, gave us a modernized take on the classic Harvest Moon formula, and it took all the knowledge gained from previous generations of developers to become not a copycat, but genre-defining itself. And Stardew Valley was primarily the work of one developer. That is, a single person. If you had suggested to me ten years ago that a single person could create a game like THAT, I would have thought you were nuts. But here we are. And here is Eternights. 

Eternights is, once again, primarily the work of a single developer, Jaehyun Yoo. Looking at the footage of this game, it is almost impossible for me to reconcile what I’m seeing with the idea that this was, for the most part, created and produced by one person. Now, I say “for the most part” because naturally Jaehyun Yoo had some assistance, though from the credits it looks like only in limited areas. For example, Clive Ruder is listed as “Narrative Designer,” though “story”’ is credited to Jaehyun Yoo, and Ray Kim has a credit for environment art, but again, Jaehyun Yoo has every other credit related to art, cinematography, visual effects, animation, battle and UI design … pretty much, you name it. Even the most jaded and cynical gamer has to acknowledge that this is pretty remarkable. 

Now, a game being made by one person doesn’t make it immune to criticism; but it DOES require that we change the lens we use to criticize it. So try to keep that in mind as I tell you about why Eternights is an incredible game that I think you absolutely should grab right now.

Eternights is one of the most original takes on a zombie story I’ve seen in recent memory. I’m going to keep this review essentially spoiler-free, so I’m limited in what I can say about the story. You are the protagonist, and you and your best friend Chani find yourself stuck in a shelter as the world is seemingly devolving into chaos. Ordinary people are turning into monsters, but for some reason, you and your friend are okay. This might or might not have something to do with the strange dreams you’ve been having about a glowing woman in a boat. When your shelter is overrun, the two of you, plus a K-pop idol that happened to be hiding in the same shelter, have to escape. And from there, you find yourself caught up in a life-or-death battle for the fate of the world. You know, normal RPG stuff.

One thing the story of Eternights does extremely well is to make you feel as confused and lost as the main character. This sounds like a backhanded compliment, or damning with faint praise, but I mean it in a good way. The conflict that’s happening behind the scenes is something you only receive glimpses of as the story progresses, with much of it being outside the control of you and your team. By layering up the mysteries and only hinting at the backstory behind it all, we’re left feeling like only a tiny piece of the puzzle, albeit an extremely important one. The MC with his glowing arm-sword is key to saving the world, but the drama happening around him is bigger than he can hope to be. At best, you can take care of your friends, the aforementioned best friend Chani, the K-pop star Yuna, the genius Sia, the track star Min, and the mysterious Yohan. While this means that a lot of the mysteries of the world and the conflict remain just that — mysteries — the story still feels extremely satisfying and complete in a way that a story that ham-fistedly explained itself just never could. 

The story is helped immensely by the extraordinary voice work. I can only speak for the English actors, as I don’t speak any other languages well enough to say, but the voice actors are all expertly cast and exquisitely directed, and their performances are nuanced and heartfelt. This is a game that mixes drama and horror and comedy into one big souffle, and without a talented voice cast, so much of that would simply be lost. Big props to Kira Buckland and Xanthe Huyhn for their directing work here. Voice direction gets overlooked a lot, but it’s so important. You can bring in the best actors, but without solid direction, their performances aren’t going to be very good. They did an excellent job here. 

While the game is an action-RPG, its gameplay loop is heavily inspired by the Persona series, so let’s talk about that for a minute. Before each major dungeon, you’re given a time limit by which you’ll need to have beaten the boss. You can spend that time however you want: you can pour all your energy into getting through the dungeon right away, or you can spend some days hanging out with your friends. Doing the latter unlocks special abilities and improves your stats, so there’s a legit gameplay reason for postponing the dungeon crawling until you’re able to power up, especially if you get stuck. Once the boss is defeated, any remaining time is yours to do with as you please. Each day is divided into day and night. You can only visit the dungeon during the day, but that’s also the only part of the day you can spend quality time with your friends. At night, you can train your various stats or pick a friend and head out to scavenge. 

Scavenging deserves special mention, as it’s essentially a minigame that sort of creates a more graphically rich version of the old Memory card game. Each friend has a variety of items they want to find. They’ll tell you the item before you head out, and when you do, you can pick from one of three places to search: a Library, a Warehouse, and a Convenience Store. Each location has several items scattered around, which you can identify by the glowing dots in the environment. The only way to tell which item is which is to examine it. Once the mini game starts, you have a limited amount of time to find the item in question. That is, assuming it’s even at the location you picked to scavenge in. The locations of all the various items never change, so as you scavenge more and more, you begin to learn where each item is. So when Min asks for headphones, hopefully you’ll remember the location and the general area they were in. Finding the item gives you a nice big boost to a stat; failing to find the item at least gives you a smaller stat boost, so it’s not a complete wasted effort. Some of the locations where certain items are found definitely don’t make a ton of logical sense, but that’s part of the fun of exploring and memorizing.

I mentioned that hanging out with your friends improves your stats and unlocks abilities. This is key to progression, as each friend has their own list of skills for you to unlock that you can only get from them. At the same time, each friend tends to have a specialization related to one of your stats. For example, Min has abilities and stat boosts related to your defense, while Chani’s are related to HP. Creating a balanced character means balancing your time with all of your friends. But of course, your resources for unlocking abilities are limited, so ulimately you do have to choose both who you prefer to spend your time with, as well as what stats you want to focus on. 

All of the big social interactions with your friends are fully voiced, which to me is a huge plus and solves one of the problems I’ve had with the Persona series, in that these important friendship-building events are almost never voiced. Maybe it’s Eternights’ smaller scale that makes this more feasible, but I get the sense that Jaehyun Yoo just feels similarly and wanted to be sure all of those important scenes got the care they deserve. And you’ll want to spend time with everyone, because each character is such an interesting and layered person. You’ll develop strong connections with all of these characters, despite the run time for the game only being 9 or 10 hours. 

In addition to the big relationship scenes between you and each character, there are a ton of interstitial scenes that pop up as the story progresses. These typically aren’t voiced, but they’re usually just funny little side events. And while they don’t get the same level of development care as the major character events, there’s still a cohesiveness to them that I don’t think you’d likely see from a bigger development team. Sometimes there are several scenes that are doing nothing but setting up a punchline for a future scene, and that payoff is totally worth the wait.

There are a couple of elements inspired by Persona I would’ve been happy to see left on the cutting room floor: the silent protagonist and the ever-present on-screen calendar. In voiced games in particular, a silent protagonist creates a strange experience with spoken dialog followed by silence, followed by dialog responding to something we didn’t hear. I’m fine with having a protagonist whose dialog options I have to choose — but why not voice them? The character HAS a voice in battle. Let him say the lines, too. Eternights does a better job of making the protagonist a character in his own right, though, which paradoxically makes the decision to have him be a silent self-insert protagonist even stranger. While you almost always have a choice about what to say, there is clearly a personality baked into this character. He’s a bit snarky and sarcastic and goofy, and this comes across regardless of what dialog choices you make. I also like that dialog options are frequent, which at least makes the main character feel like an active part of the story. My calendar quibble is super minor, but I feel the same way here as I do in Persona. I don’t really need the calendar in the corner of my screen during a cutscene, do I? Is that the most vital piece of information that I need to have available to me at all times? It’s not, sorry to answer my own question, but it’s just really not. Anyway, that’s minor, just a nitpick, moving on. 

Actually, while we’re nitpicking, there’s one forced stealth sequence that irritated me to no end. Now, to be fair to Jaehyun Yoo, a big part of my frustration was that, by this point in the game, I had forgotten that I could push L3 to move faster. So, that’s partially a whoopsy-daisy on my part, but still, if you’re making a game and you realize you’re about to put in a forced stealth segment, you might want to reconsider. This is a general statement to all developers out there. Just give it some thought, ya’ll. 

The music is also a bit of a letdown. It’s not bad, it’s all appropriate for the action on-screen, but I didn’t come across anything particularly memorable to me. 

And a somewhat bigger issue is the non-battle animations. They aren’t the best. The character modeling and environments are good, but character animations are a bit janky. I don’t just mean Chani’s run cycle, either — though that is terrible for a couple of reasons, only one of which was intentional. He runs like a doofus, and I get THAT was on purpose, but even then the execution of that doofus run isn’t great. But I specified non-battle animations for this criticism, because the actual in-battle animations are pretty solid. 

Speaking of battles, we haven’t talked about them yet, so let’s get into the combat. Whew, I’m going to do my best to convey this properly to you all, but I’m worried I won’t do it justice. 

Within the first fifteen minutes of Eternights, I thought I was going to hate this gameplay. I played the game on Normal difficulty, but I was just NOT getting it. It’s an action RPG, so naturally there’s a lot of sword swinging and dodging and parrying. But the rhythm of it all felt … OFF to me somehow. It’s hard to explain. Maybe my muscle memory was still attuned to Final Fantasy XVI or something, since that was the game I played just before this, but the number of Game Over screens I was seeing early on gave me a pretty negative early reaction.

But after some time? Maybe an hour or so? I absolutely FELL IN LOVE with this combat. 

This is definitely the biggest swing in my feelings about a game over possibly the shortest time period. I seriously thought I just wasn’t going to be able to play it, or that maybe I’d have to switch to Easy mode and just brute force my way through the game. But I’m glad I was patient and actually tried to learn the system, because it all works together SO WELL. 

At its most basic, Eternights uses the typical hack and slash combo and dodge system you’ll find it a lot of action RPGs. Where Eternights differs, however, is in just how weighty and satisfying the action feels, and how battling monsters involves much more than simply button mashing, but it’s actually a process that’s fun to learn and feels extremely good to execute. Some of the lower ranking enemies can be killed pretty easily with basic sword swings, but more powerful enemies possess shields. These shields will keep you from doing any damage to them at all. However, by performing perfect dodges and attacking, you’ll build up your elemental meter. Once it’s full, you can use an elemental attack. Each of the characters who join you in combat have a different elemental power, so using the appropriate element against the shield you’re up against will cause it to break. This process involves some simple Quick Time Event-style timed button presses, which sounds like a drag, but it never felt like one in the moment. But there’s so much more to the combat beyond the elemental shield breaking. Executing perfect dodges involves rolling away at the moment an enemy is attacking, which is helpfully signified by a flashing red circle and a chime. Learning to trust the indicators and not just the enemy animations was a big part of the early learning curve for me, but once I got the hang of what the developer was doing here, it became second nature. Once you gain the ability to parry, you’ll do this in much the same way, but a successful parry will quickly build your Deathblow meter. This is something that fills up as you attack, but depletes quickly when you stop. Getting it full, like you might expect, lets you pull off a devastating special move that will bring down a lot of non-boss enemies in a single hit. 

Your companions also have abilities they can use in battle, but they’ll never do anything on their own. You can issue them a command by holding down R2 and choosing from the options that pop up. Each character has two moves that you can upgrade throughout the game. Yuna’s are healing abilities, Min’s are more shielding based, and Sia’s are attacks. All of these abilities draw from a shared meter, though, and once that meter is depleted, there’s NO way to replenish it aside from returning to your base and trying the dungeon again the next day. This is similar again to the Persona series’ use of SP management as a sort of barrier to progress, but here, you don’t even have the benefit of certain hard-to-come-by items to give you a refill and allow you to continue. On top of that, the timeframe you have to finish each dungeon is quite a bit shorter than the Persona games, but it’s balanced in such a way that I never felt overly rushed or stressed.

The dungeons themselves aren’t super interesting, and there are only around four of them, depending on how you count. They’re often WAY too dark, as well. Your magic sword arm glows and creates lots of cool character lighting effects, but it doesn’t do much to illuminate the environment. I rarely got lost though, and there are a handful of puzzles that pop up to keep things from getting stale. All in all, the environments didn’t blow me away, but the general visual presentation DEFINITELY did. This is a FINE looking game. It is stuffed with style. Flashy effects and cool lighting and artistic camera angles. It’s visually stunning. 

If technology is reaching the point where a single person can do THIS much work on a game, then I think you can see why I’m excited to see what the future holds. Eternights is the first game from this developer, and if this is where he’s STARTING, I can’t imagine where he’s going. 

This is the first game I’ve played in YEARS where, as soon as I rolled credits, I started over again. Seriously, if you don’t know me, that might not mean much, but that is HUGE for me. Eternights is an acquired taste, and it requires just as much of you as you will of it. But if you can get it to stick for you, you’re in for a fantastic ride.