Aeterna Noctis
This is a bit of a difficult game for me to review. Even though I finished the game and generally had a good time, I still had quite a bit of mixed feelings about the game.
Aeterna is a metroidvania and mostly follows the rules of the genre. You start off relatively weak and then as you progress and get more powers, you start to become a powerhouse and get to steamroll most everything. As a general rule of thumb, metroidvanias tend to fall into two camps, the combat camp, and the platforming camp. There’s also the general exploration camp as well, but generally the gameplay mechanics only really encourage either making combat difficult, or the platforming difficult.
Aeterna defintiely falls into the category of making it more of a platforming challenge than a combat challenge. Almost all of the difficulty in the game comes from the precise platforming and its pretty much a fact that during certain sections of this game you’re going to have very sweaty palms. I played in Aeterna (normal or easy) difficulty and while 95% of the platforming is fine, there were defintily some portions that gave me the Path of Pain PTSD flashbacks.
The combat itself is also half decent, giving you a good selection of weapons and powers to choose from, although by and large I used the default sword you start with 99% of the time. The weapons you get are never given a proper introduction and their use cases are almost always situational. There’ll be times when I remember to use the other weapons, but I’d say for the most part you’re fine ignoring them.
There’s also a decent skill tree, focusing on ranged, health, and melee. You get a bit of options, but some nodes are just clearly better than others. 5% less cost on skills or heal faster? I’m not sure anyone would pick the 5% less cost on skills. =)
The story isn’t anything to write home about either, there’s a story for sure, and the main character is quite chatty in both exposition of story as well as telling you how to use each tool “press b for etc”. There’s some mystery as to what exactly is happening as the story in the game doesn’t really tell you, but its better than the “your princess is in another castle” storyline at least.
Artwork and exploration is also quite well done in the game. It takes a bit of time for the art to grow on you but it evantually does. There’s quite a lot of variance in the game from underground dungeons to overworld exploration. The game starts off with somewhat of a unified world (albeit very very straight line), and then devolves into individual worlds. Some of it is semi-connected but by-and-large its separated dungeons for much of the end-game.
Music is mostly piano and for some that might be appealing but for me it was ok. I played about 1/4 of the game without music and didn’t notice the lack of it to be honest.
So why is this a hard game for me to review? Mostly because of how hard the platforming in the game is. For those who love celeste and its ilk, it must feel like some sort of god’s gift where your dreams come true. A metroidvania that has celeste’esque platforming?? But for me, metroidvania is mostly about exploration and the growing power fantasy and in this game the exploration mostly takes a back seat to the extreme platforming. Even in the normal/easy difficulty there’s quite a bit of precision and while the difficulty is dialed down, if you’re not good at platforming, you might as well not even bother to start the game. Boss fights also involve some platforming where if you don’t hit the right platforms a the right time you’re going to die/get hit.
Overall, I give this a solid 4 stars. If you’re into platforming, then 5 stars easily, but compared to the 6 stars that I give Hollow Knight (out of 5 stars), that’s kinda where Aeterna Noctis lands for me. I really want to recommend it, but the extreme emphasis on platforming makes it hard for me to push it any more than what I give it.
Towards the end, I was really rushing to get it over with and derived a lot less enjoyment of it than I had in the middle of the game.