Eternal Hope (PC) Preview

The premise behind Eternal Hope is perhaps its simplest, yet strongest, point. At its core it's a platformer, offering two-dimensional movement, an action key, and the ability to switch between the regular and the spirit world, which will offer new paths and grant access to hidden spirits and their abilities. The way forward is not always immediately clear, and Ti'bi and the player will have to rely on a combination of platforming and switching between realms to navigate the harsh landscape and collect the missing soul fragments.

Graphically speaking, the spirits are the high point, for sure. They are, for the most part, grotesque yet alluring, creepy yet beautiful. The rest of the game leaves more to be desired; it's like a colour-splashed Limbo, and doesn't do much to capture the attention. The game also lags and stutters whenever loading things, like floating text or NPCs ahead, which seems a bit excessive for a title with so little going on.

Where it falls flat is in the controls and puzzles. Controls are inconsistent and unresponsive, and often the game will suddenly throw out events that require quick reactions and precise movements, but poor response times, sloppy hit-boxes, and inconsistent outcomes make most of these more frustrating than anything else. Players may have to drag a box, for instance, climb it, jump up to a ledge, and then jump to an adjacent ledge, and it might feel like they are pressing the jump button the same every time, but sometimes Ti'bi will gain all of two inches of upward momentum before falling to his demise. Other puzzles involve rapidly switching between the two worlds, and often a ledge or platform will be visible, yet Ti'bi will still fall right through it or fail to grab on. Couple this with how checkpoints are placed seemingly randomly, and it means that frustrating sections of the game are left to be repeated time and again.

Puzzles rely almost entirely on contextual clues, and in most cases these are never given. Players are simply left to repeatedly die from things they likely had no idea were going to kill them, essentially taking wild stabs in the dark to try to solve a puzzle once all of the obvious on-screen options have been exhausted. Given the aforementioned poor hit-boxes and sloppy controls, oftentimes this critic found himself trying something, watching it fail, and then getting stuck for a while only to realise that the first hunch was correct, and it was a case of simply misplacing the jump by a few pixels, or not holding the jump button long enough to get the right amount of hang time. The levels so far feel entirely linear, relying more on leaving the player in the dark about how to proceed than on an abundance of puzzles, or activities, or hidden goodies to pad them out.