Eternights is a huge achievement for the individuals who made the game. While the game's writing comes across pretty juvenile, the creators still delivered on their vision and made an interesting work. What clearly started as a fan work of Persona, SMT, and action RPGs does create its own identity. There is a great amount of gameplay variety, and you can feel the joy the creators must have felt adding in different puzzles, minigames, bonds, and creating the dungeon layouts. These additions are not there to distract from the core gameplay loop, but instead does a good job of breaking it up and feeling like you have a diverse experience for the entire 12 hours or so of the game.
I had fun with the battle system, but without the extra bells and whistles outside of combat, it would have overstayed its welcome. There is a decent amount of unlocks in the combat, but most of it can be reduced to dodging attacks and then building up your meter to breaking an enemy's shield wit ha special attack and then just spam "x" to combo and deathblow them. The special attacks have quicktime events and sometimes missing prompts would have you lose your momentum or it wouldn't target the right character, which was really just a minor annoyance more than anything. The skills you unlock from your party members also mostly went to waste and I didn't even really realize how much it changed things until the final chapter. All of it is a little bit janky, but it's fun jankiness. It's a challenge on normal difficulty but you will eventually meet the game on its own terms.
The writing is something I am still conflicted about. It's mostly pretty funny and has a sort of interesting world building that seems very inspired by COVID and the impact it has on already socially isolated teens. The characters are all quite sympathetic, though there is an abundance of horny otaku stuff, which is offputting. I think this could have been well neutralized by going darker, but I think the edginess that the game hints at early on doesn't deliver. I think the game is at its most compelling at the very beginning but the momentum doesn't really have much of a place to go. The mystery and unsettling early chapters don't pay off. To the game's credit, they chose not to go for an easy fanservice ending, however it still didn't have much of an impact on me.
In the end, I think this game will split people a lot, but it is exciting to see something like this as a debut game from a new developer and I look forward to seeing what they produce next.
I had fun with the battle system, but without the extra bells and whistles outside of combat, it would have overstayed its welcome. There is a decent amount of unlocks in the combat, but most of it can be reduced to dodging attacks and then building up your meter to breaking an enemy's shield wit ha special attack and then just spam "x" to combo and deathblow them. The special attacks have quicktime events and sometimes missing prompts would have you lose your momentum or it wouldn't target the right character, which was really just a minor annoyance more than anything. The skills you unlock from your party members also mostly went to waste and I didn't even really realize how much it changed things until the final chapter. All of it is a little bit janky, but it's fun jankiness. It's a challenge on normal difficulty but you will eventually meet the game on its own terms.
The writing is something I am still conflicted about. It's mostly pretty funny and has a sort of interesting world building that seems very inspired by COVID and the impact it has on already socially isolated teens. The characters are all quite sympathetic, though there is an abundance of horny otaku stuff, which is offputting. I think this could have been well neutralized by going darker, but I think the edginess that the game hints at early on doesn't deliver. I think the game is at its most compelling at the very beginning but the momentum doesn't really have much of a place to go. The mystery and unsettling early chapters don't pay off. To the game's credit, they chose not to go for an easy fanservice ending, however it still didn't have much of an impact on me.
In the end, I think this game will split people a lot, but it is exciting to see something like this as a debut game from a new developer and I look forward to seeing what they produce next.