Legends of Ethernal

A solid action-platformer that FINALLY takes all the wanton killing seriously! (At least up until the point I'm currently at.) The overall aesthetic is very soothing, and the action and platforming, while fairly simple at their core, make good use of situational mechanics to provide a range of satisfying puzzles. Looking forward to playing more!

This game is an interesting platformer, reminiscent of the games of old while keeping up with some more recent gameplay mechanics. This little game does not have the grandiose cinematics of bigger videogames with big budget, but the story is told like a book and the art is beautiful. The game design is quite nice and is accompanied with a very good soundtrack. It offers a good challenge at normal mode and the boss fights are quite interesting, each having its own twist to beat it. There is a good variety of level, from the nice forest to what fells like the depth of hell, passing by swamps and creepy spider caves. There are secrets to find to upgrade your weapons and spells, as well as scrolls detailing the world around. Overall, it's quite a wonderful fun little game that is worth you time.

I had a lot of fun playing Legends of Ethernal and I highly recommend it. I love challenging games and I got served. Instead of hack'n'slashing through the enemies, you have to carefully study them in order to learn their action patterns. Some boss fights are quite difficult, but rewarding. Actually, I wish there were more of them. The colourful graphics and dialogues made exploring Arkanys entertaining. Oh and I have to give a special mention to the soundtrack...it has been spinning as one of my Spotify playlist ! Very dreamy and atmospheric stuff.

Absolute great game, Metroidvania pure and very well done. A+++

Legends of Ethernal is a really good Metroidvania made from an indy studio. Its art and music are absolutely a blast. Game starts easy but difficulty increase kind of rapidly and not long into it, you learn that you need skill and brain to advance. Each boss fight is a puzzle in itself, it isn't just a button smasher. The story starts with a simple mystery but it grows and you want to see how it ends. Reviews says this game is hard and it kind of is, which is a great thing for me (playing my first playthrough at normal). For other metroidvania lovers, if you had a fun with Salt and Sanctuary, Hollow knight or Rogue Legacy, this game won't be too hard. The checkpoint system is generous, there's always one before tricky parts and you lose nothing when you die. So will you die ? Yes. Does it matter, not that all­. You learn and you move on. and you feel achievement when you succeed.

Many games try to innovate, to add a new twist or even coat of paint over a beloved formula. Others don't. [i]Legends of Ethernal[/i] is a platforming adventure that does nothing new. You jump, you defeat enemies, you collect power-ups, and solve some basic traversal puzzles. There is nothing here you haven't seen before. It does all this well enough. Combat is decent and there are a few fun boss and mini-boss fights. The level design is OK: platforming is not too hard and the traversal is mostly linear. Exploration is rewarded if you take your time. There's no in-game map, which is fine ... unless you leave the game for a while and come back. You probably won't remember where to go. Does anything stand out? Anything at all? Well, I guess the graphic style is especially nice, calling back to the early days of video games with some crisp and artsy flourishes. The music is fine but too repetitive. All in all, I enjoyed my time with this game. But there are countless games in this genre that do pretty much everything better.

A little too basic, a little too paint-by-number, a little too much repetition in enemies, just too blah to keep me from turning from turning it off due to boredum.

The game is absolutely gorgeous, but listen here friends: there are way too many action platformers out there for you to play, and many of them are quite beautiful as well, and so simply "being beautiful" is not enough to excuse the fact that [i]Legends of Ethernal[/i] is simply not a very good game. And while it may be "beautiful" this is hampered by the fact that the game's "beauty" feels very repetitive. The feel of the physics, along with the avatar's silhouette, reminded me a lot of [i]Limbo[/i] in how it played; [i]Limbo[/i] had that distinctive "springiness" to jumping and falling that sort of felt like you were propelling a heavy ragdoll, which can actually feel very satisfying and fluid. Unlike [i]Limbo[/i], however, which exists under a completely despairing and oppressive atmosphere, [i]Ethernal[/i] is bright and whimsical and as a result winds up using this fluidity of play to create a very comforting, relaxing experience, to which this sort of game-feel is well suited. The problem, however, is with how the other elements of the game interfere with this fluidity. Firstly is the combat. Combat in [i]Ethernal[/i] is very stop-start. It feels "static" and makes the game's natural sense of motion come to a complete stop. A game that came to mind a lot was [i]Muramasa: The Demon Blade[/i] (an often relatively-neglected Vanillaware game that may not be as "complex" as [i]Odin Sphere[/i] but I think I'd still tie with it as my favourite of their games), initially just because the level design was very reminiscent of it, but then because the platforming elements of the game and the combat elements of the game [i]both[/i] felt really fluid, even though [i]Muramasa[/i] quite literally stops you in place whenever combat begins, it still feels as though combat and movement are extensions of each other, they both feel satisfyingly fluid. [i]Ethernal[/i] does not accomplish this. It doesn't help matters that pitfalls kill you instantly, even prompting a whole death screen, which feels weird in a game where enemy monsters chip your health away gradually, and there were at least two occasions where the game didn't really adequately communicate me that there WAS a pitfall to be concerned about. Another impediment is the game text. I generally hate when a game begins with a lore dump, I think that's just bad game design (even though some of my favourite games do this--[i]Super Metroid[/i], [i]The Wind Waker[/i], and [i]Mega Man 2[/i] all come to mind, although they each had the benefit of setting their respective lore dumps to some of the greatest video game music ever composed), and this game's lore dump is regrettably unskippable. The lore is... not particularly interesting, and frankly could have been conveyed better if presented visually through the game's beautiful environments. See, once again I find myself thinking about [i]Limbo[/i], where everything you need to know is inferred from what you see. Dialogue is another stop-start annoyance, is extremely perfunctory, occurs too often, and often says more than needs to be said. It would be enough to have the kid come home and find his family home destroyed, we the players can figure out the rest. Barring that, you could have the kid say something very brief (I'd have maybe even just confined it to a dialogue box that opens while you continue moving around to avoid the stop-start problem), but instead there's several dialogue boxes to click through, and then a brief bit of freedom to move, and then [i]more[/i] dialogue boxes. I know you might want to tell me that it might seem odd to have a character discover his ransacked home and say nothing, but I'd counter that by reminding you that in one of the most moving scenes in [i]Star Wars[/i], Luke Skywalker discovers his family home in flames along with the [i]visible charred corpses of his aunt and uncle[/i] and he does nothing but look at it mournfully and then look away. It is over in a fraction of the time this game takes to mourn the loss of a family home we've never even seen before and the disappearance of parents we've never even met. Skipping dialogue is inconsistent, because while sometimes you can simply press A to complete the dialogue string and then A again to quickly skip it, every other dialogue string is tied to an animation that must be played out before it can be skipped -- what's especially hard to understand though is why you can't press A during the animation to at least load the full dialogue string like you can when there [i]isn't[/i] an animation (I hate when dialogue boxes have the words or letters appear gradually rather than all at once, it's really f*cking frustrating when it's advancing slower than your normal reading speed, this is a video game design cliche that really ought to die out). I did not play much of [i]Ethernal[/i] but I played enough to know this wasn't for me. I checked out a playthrough online and skipped ahead to confirm whether or not this was all the game really had to offer and... yes, that seemed to be the case. In a saturated game market, a game like [i]Legends of Ethernal[/i] needs to do more to intrigue me out the gate because, brother, I have a steam backlog of unplayed games over one thousand titles long and I don't have the time for it.

shout out to this game for forcing me to brave manhood by facing captain hansel in the most aggressive manner because running away is not an option when the game bugs out (no cowards allowed, cowards)

A fun and tricky but also accessible 2d puzzle action platformer. Well worth the price of admission and replayable fun with the challenge modes and achievements.