The trailer for this title, unveiled for the first time during Sony’s State of Play in June 2022, alternated between action scenes, cinematics in a purely Japanese style and romance. An improbable merger that we had to see with our own eyes. If you’ve read our other previews from Summer Game Fest, you’re starting to know the song. With barely thirty minutes of handling, we barely have time to scratch the surface, especially with a proposal like this, but Studio Sai knows what it is doing with its atypical formula and the guideline stands pretty good.
love with humor
The beginning of the game opens with the creation of our profile on a dating app with the help of our best friend, who fell for these ladies, while our character is the type who does not really know how to go about it and doesn’t seem more interested than that anyway. Studio Sai has given itself the means to offer a complete dubbing of its game in English (as well as in Korean and Japanese according to the words of the person accompanying us for this demo) for all the characters… except our hero. An understandable and frequent choice in games of the genre, but which may pose a problem for some (your servant included). Seeing characters speak to us to take silences because our answers will only be in writing is not particularly natural.
If we have to retain a quality of writing to Eternals, it’s for his humor. The choices of answers offered are often very funny, ranging from sarcasm to exacerbated pragmatism and we smiled a lot in front of certain situations, without necessarily laughing out loud. Of course, things get even funnier when it comes to interacting with a character with a romance stake. Unfortunately, we won’t see much more of the possibilities for romance in this preview, but that dash of humor works just as well because the plot is much darker than we imagine.
An apocalyptic event turns humans into violent monsters, and huge ethereal walls have locked our protagonist in an open-air prison. From the first half hour, we witness the violent murder of one of our companions in misfortune and our character has his arm cut off in a beautiful cinematic full of hemoglobin leaving little room for imagination. The contrast between the innocuous dialogues and the main plot has something striking and one inevitably wonders how far the development team will push the vice in this dichotomy.
Love makes you blind
If the few cutscenes that we have seen are very clean, the rest of the game is not the most visually inspired. Put a filter to give a blue/purple tint to the set ofEternals is not enough to hide the lack of inspiration on the side of the decorations. The corridors of the Japanese earthquake shelter in which our character takes refuge after the start of the apocalypse are of a rather exceptional redundancy and exploration is not really a pleasure. Add to that movement animations whose fluidity is more than questionable… Fortunately, the design of the few monsters encountered counterbalances all this, and some are reminiscent of those that we could come across in Ghostwire: Tokyo.
On the combat side, the real-time proposal is certainly classic, but effective. After having his arm cut off, our hero now has a weapon against monsters which we will not obtain for reasons of disclosure. A fast attack, a heavy attack, a dodge with a perfect timing system and a combo system that rewards us with a special attack after a certain number of hits are on the program. In short, nothing very original, but it’s dynamic enough to fulfill its role and we imagine that the enemies will become more subtle and complex as those we were able to fight in this grip which, let’s remember -le, covered the first half hour of play.