Previewing a game is often little more 🔯than a sophisticated vibe check. The engine of the story is just humming along while the mechanics barely get out of first gear. It’s easy to tell if a game is bad from an hour’s play, but it&rsquꦫo;s much harder to tell if it’s good. Eternights is not a bad game. But it’s certainly a strange one.
In broad strokes, the opening hour I played of Eternights is in line with a lot of other games. After an outbreak hits your city, you head to an underground bunker (the as-yet unexplained world building treats having underground security bunkers as standard) and are among the last few survivors. You’re attacked by a monstrous thing, but gai🐈n powers, and then creep around the small dungeon of said bunker, hacking ‘n’ slashing your way to victory.
You’re down there with your roommate, and a woman who is looking for her best friend, lost in the chaos. As monsters lin🃏ger, clearly possessing other citizens, you must stealthily explore each corridor. In a twist on the ‘two normal guys and a pretty girl’ team composition, the girl is a famous pop star who just happens to have taken shelter right next door to the boys. I suppose it’s technically possible, like if a disaster hit New York and you suddenly found yourself in the bomb shelter with Taylor Swift. Except not Taylor Swift because the singer and her friend are very pointedly named Yuna and Jisoo. I imagine Rosé, Lisa, and Jennie will appear before the credits roll.
Gameplay already has some variety, with a skill tree promising yet more options, and the ability to bring companions into combat with you. Presumably these companions will either grow in complexity or number as the game goes on (based on the key art, the latter). So far it reminds me of the organised carnage of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:NEO: The World Ends With You, an🐎d while it’s less layered so far mechanically, the vibes are 💜there. But beneath the surface of the gameplay is an odd tone and I’m not quite sure if I get it yet.
Eternights is also a dating sim, with the preview ending after the first real bout of flirtation. Throughout cutscenes, how you answer questions shapes your personality. It’s a more engaging system than some of the typical ‘be a good person’ or ‘be a dick’ dichotomies that rely on the players to consider choices with no incentive other than the ‘bad’ answer being funny. Here you can be bold, which will unlock more confident responses later; empathetic, which allows you to connect more deeply with other characters; and intelligent, which grants a wider well of knowledge to plumb in future con𓆉versations.
However, all of this is wrapped around a hyper-sexual focus, and this is where the vibes are hard to read. Video games do need to embrace a relationship with sexual content more openly, and I have written before that 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:gaming sorely lacks sex 🔯positive women like Bella Thorne, Kim Petras, or Becky G. Were I writing that article today, I might also have mentioned Ice ꦺSpice. Eternights is comfortable di𓂃scussing sex in ways that make the story unique, but I’m still not sure who’s in on the joke.
That aforementioned article on sex positivity was about the return of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Lollipop Chainsaw, and while the Achievement for upskirting is highly outdated, and some of the more extreme costumes need a redesign, Lollipop Chainsaw mostly took Juliet along for the ride. She didn’t exist to be objectified but to offer empowerment, in the same way celebrities like Miley Cyrus do. Likewise, when Lady Dimitrescu wa🃏s t🅷he subject of our collective horniness, there was a knowing sensuality to how the character was designed that folded that sexuality into her world. With E🥃ternights, I’m not so sure.
There were a few moments where I had to laugh - the offbeat comedy of the game is excellent. When running to the underground bunker, your roommate packs in a rush and forgets the toothbrushes but remembers the porno mags. After the first boss battle, your character believes they are dying, and the conversation runs to some old GILF porn you and your🅠 roommate watched together, where your final words determine what boost you get. I told him I enjoyed it and was not ashamed and then got a +1 for boldness.
After this, your character sheepishly dusts themselves down and realises they were barely injured at all. It’s not the most sophisticated humour but it’s weird enough to be unique. As is🐎 standard for these sorts of chosen one stories, your arm becomes magical. Unfort🅰unately when it’s not actively a weapon against the darkness, it looks a lot like a dildo.
The trouble is, it feels right on the line, and I can sense the dating sim elements tipping into Killer is Dead territory, where female characters exist to be ogled at and groped, shearing off the romantic chemistry in favour of physical reward.♏ I get a lot of emails about shovelware games that see the lead male hero hypnotise or▨ humiliate female caricatures, and there are moments of Eternights that I fear wouldn’t be out of place in those titles.
It’s difficult to get a sense of Eternights, because the gameplay didn’t feel like any♊thing special. Then again, neither did NEO:TWEWY in the first hour and by the end I was in love. The writing is funny, but I can see it getting old, and I’m not sure what I make of the sexual content yet. I feel like I’ve laughed at a joke just on the edges of my humour, and I’m ready to make a quick exit when the next one starts “okay so an Irishman, a Rabbi, and blonde walk into a bar…”. One thing I do know is I’ll definitely be checking out Eternights when it drops on PC & PlayStation on September 21, and that makes for a successful preview.