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The Eternal Cylinder review: an outlandish, delightful, and surprisingly approachable survival adventureEntirely platonic Darwinism
Entirely platonic Darwinism
But is itreallyabout a giant cylinder? And what do such esoteric choices add up to in this latest Ace Team venture into the unfamiliar? Let’s find out.
The truth is that The Eternal Cylinder is less about its primary and titular antagonist, the giant cylinder which is crushing a colourful alien world beneath its red hot immensity, than it is about its protagonists, the trunk-snouted trebhum: a bipedal not-people who are the emotional and gameplay heart of this lovely, remarkably approachable game.
The Eternal Cylinder - Release Date Announcement TrailerWatch on YouTube
The Eternal Cylinder - Release Date Announcement Trailer
The Eternal Cylinder has snorted up various aspects of the survival genre to make this conceit work. Unlike most survival games, however, the experience is a more linear one, because to survive you must continue to move forward to avoid being crushed, and so that linearity is a sort wide and packaged corridor: the cylinder is halted at various junctures, and you get to explore a strip of land in front of it, filling your stomachs and doing what you can to make the most of the resources at your disposal.
Stomachs, yes. Eating, or at least hoovering stuff up to store it and then pumping directly into… another hole, is the background loop which powers the game along. Some of the things you eat have an even more immediate effect on your trebhum than restoring energy levels because they cause changes. Yes, this is not evolution in the breeding sense (thank goodness) but one in which you transform your creatures depending on your deepening needs via eating cubes, crystals, seeds, and weird fungus. Some of these mutations are passive effects, which allow you to traverse further, faster, boosting your stamina, or covering you in fur to survive low temperatures, and things like that. More dramatically though, there are also numerous set pieces throughout the game which demand that you evolve to defeat them: things such as a switch that requires you to turn into a cube to activate it, or a puzzle which requires you to have sucker feet to reach the goal, or an obstacle which you must inflate like a balloon to float over the vast dead body of some sort of infinite space eel which lies decomposing in the sea ahead of you. Some of these set pieces are clever and fun, others are frustrating.
There’s quite a lot here, with a broad range of mutations for different purposes. There was a degree to which I felt in danger of confusion, but the system unfolded carefully over a long time and I was surprised at how rarely I stumbled into situations where I died unfairly because I didn’t have the right mutations selected. Nevertheless I was pulled back and forth between feeling like this adaptation system was a daunting array of special abilities and perhaps too much to think about, and the feeling of being a little frustrated that there wasn’t enough opportunity to exploit it. I only occasionally felt like I was truly being provided with the opportunity to explore that and to utilise what I had learned.
A big save, and a contributing factor to my sense of satisfaction, is that the game is beautifully narrated and pitched upon a weird and charming story (a significant contributor to which, Jonas Kyratzes, has produced work you might have encountered before in The Sea Will Claim Everything andThe Talos Principle). This story encompasses the entire game. Within it there are moments of genuine surprise, powerful elements of mystery, and scenes of horror. The tale has a child-like sense of wonder, and a comfortableness to it, like a familiar bed-time story. And yet it is also furnished with the sort of ambulatory nightmarishness that gives Ace Team their enormous aesthetic power. There were times when I felt distinctly uncomfortable, and even terrified for my waddling family.
Despite this, The Eternal Cylinder never really feels like it isaboutits story, if that makes sense. Even while the story encompasses it, and wraps everything in the sort of friendly narrative glow that is so often missing from other games, it is what you see in the camera, this multicoloured world being flattened, that is the star. It’s Ace Team’s enormous aesthetic power, which, ultimately, I feel The Eternal Cylinder is a vehicle for. And this is the crucial reason why you should buy and play The Eternal Cylinder.
So perhaps what The Eternal Cylinder isreallyabout is how the spirit of creativity flees ahead of all those forces that seek to flatten and homogenise it, how it will take on any form to do so, and how Ace Team are one of the strange families fleeing with that light into the unknown that lies ahead of us. That Ace Team have managed to keep making these outlandish games is, all on its own, a chance to be hopeful, a motivation for us all to evolve, and certainly a good reason to buy The Eternal Cylinder. Which you should if what I have said about this game appeals to you even remotely.
