Steam Game Festival had a lot of cool demos to offer – booming with many indie titles. At Gameffine, we covered a lot of them! Amongst them, there were a few pretty decent platformers, one of which happened to be Doublehit Games‘ debut title- Eternal Hope. From a visual standpoint, it seemed like a mish-mash of Playdead studio titles as it drew inspiration from Limbo‘s platforming and Inside‘s visual design. As claimed by the studio themselves, it is also slightly reminiscent of Studio Ghibli‘s works.
The demo starts with a short opening sequence that introduces us to the lonesome Ti’bi, the protagonist. This is followed by some light traversal and Ti’bi eventually stumbles upon another character. The following montage hints at them eventually falling in love and spending some blissful time together. Unsurprisingly, tragedy isn’t lingering that far off. During a stormy day, after numerous struggles, Ti’bi manages to reach his usual romantic rendevous point atop a cliff and finds his beloved already there.
The storm eventually proves to be fateful when the cliff crumbles and Ti’bi helplessly sees his lover falling to her death. Grief-stricken Ti’bi is eventually met with a glimpse of hope when he stumbles upon a Soul Demon. The Demon propositions him to gather the fragments of his lover’s shattered soul and a few others, and in exchange, he’ll resurrect his lover. He also lends him his ability to travel between the realms (that of the living and dead) to accomplish this task. This is where our tale begins.
The game is divided into several chapters and each chapter has a series of puzzles for you to overcome. Each of these requires a helping hand from the Tul (beings that inhabit the other realm). Its pitch-dark sprites (similar to Limbo) allows the environmental objects to be hidden in plain sight. Even though these puzzles were old-fashioned, they were functional. The only thing that bogs the pacing of these puzzles is the dynamics of its platforming.
Jumping, hanging from a ledge, and swinging by rope seemed unresponsive at times. Hanging by the ledges was by far the most frustrating part of these puzzles. Every time while reaching for the ledge, Ti’bi would jump off the ledge instead of holding on to it. To avoid falling off the ledge I had to move abysmally slow. In certain sections, I encountered input lag while jumping. Another frustrating part of its platforming is reminiscent of CD Projekt Red’s The Witcher 3. Just like Geralt, low altitude jumps are fatal for Ti’bi and these can lead to some frustrating moments. These are the few loose ends in the title that I want to be tightened by the time it gets released.
The entire demo of Eternal Hope took me only about 40-50 minutes to finish, consisting of the first three chapters of the title. The game gets most of the things right, especially when it comes to its atmosphere and the background score. The tone of the narrative is dark and the minimalistic art-design is striking due to its effective use of contrasting colors. There are no issues with its optimization as well, my guess is it would run on pretty much anything you can throw at it, as long as the hardware isn’t a decade old.
Eternal Hope: The Prologue, the free demo is available on Steam. If you’re interested in anything remotely related to platformers, make sure you check out its demo. From what I have seen in the demo, it has already made its way into my steam wishlist. With a few tweaks, this is shaping up to be a promising platformer.