EarthNight's impossibly stylish gameplay and art direction draw players into a whimsical fantasy of dragon slaying. Its multitude of secrets, carefully rewarding platforming, and retro heartbeat allow each moment and each run of this gem to always surprise and captivate.
EarthNight captures the raw feeling of impactful adventure in the first quick, effortless moments of its introduction. The opening theme, an emotionally punctual bit of retro synths, crescendos through a brief expository cutscene. The title screen appears in beauty and flash. You press start and watch your chosen character fall through a fantastical sky and land on the back of a dragon and dash to the right.
If, like me, you are prepared for what happens next, you’ll jump off the heads of small creatures and soar through the sky, attempting an ascent through hundreds of objects and enemies and details that whizz by before ultimately sprinting to the dragon’s head to repeatedly stab it and slay it. EarthNight is never as gruesome or as confusing as it sounds. Instead, it’s as joyously bombastic and weird and fun as it sounds.
The opening salvo of EarthNight‘s assault on your senses grips at the heart. The game beeps and buzzes and plays like a developer from thirty years ago was frozen in time with the perfect idea and thawed. A gripping 8-/16-bit theme hooks you into mostly still frames of story only to greet you by a grand title screen. A character select, an immediate thrust into gameplay with little explanation. The developers at Cleaversoft obviously are mindful of the Nintendo pioneers that laid similar groundwork.
Everything about the way EarthNight presents itself gave my gaming soul this wonderful ache. Without pretense, the game tells you what you absolutely need to know between loading screens or planted right in the background of the action. In under a minute, players are made aware that dragons have taken over the Earth and that humanity has all but given up and fled to space. Sydney and Stanley, our protagonists, take it upon themselves to begin the long skydive from space to the surface of Earth, slaying dragons to end their reign over humanity. To do this, players must simply avoid danger and live long enough to slay the final dragon.
From here, EarthNight blossoms into a much larger, much more intricate game. As an auto-runner, Stanley and Sydney will constantly move towards the right of the screen towards their final dragon head destination. Only a scant few times will players ever find themselves not moving in this direction. With that singular goal in mind, Cleaversoft riddles the game with layers to ensure that the simple formula isn’t overly so.
First comes the choice of the two characters. Sydney, the young girl who houses a dragon spirit inside her, can jump again, forward-dash, or dive diagonally downward after her initial jump or bouncing off the top of an enemy. Stanley can perform a jump or a much longer, horizontal jump but not after bouncing off an enemy. So why not always go with Sydney who has the wider range of movement? At first, Sydney is a great tool for beginners, allowing a greater command of mid-air movement. Stanley begins to show his relevance as players begin to dive further into the game.
EarthNight rarely feels like just an auto-runner like Canabalt or Jetpack Joyride before it. Where those games only truly challenged the player with getting as far as possible before death, EarthNight spices up every element of the genre to become a more complete experience. Along the dragon’s back are dozens of nonsense items that can be picked up and collected as water, the currency used in this version of the apocalypse. Whether a jelly bean, robot part, beard, wig, piece of cheese, or stuffed animal, these objects will grow your total of water that can be used to purchase upgrades. Just like a messy kid’s room, these objects are littered around platforms and floating on balloons and grouped together with some rhyme and reason. Players can also find up to three dragon eggs that are specific to the type of dragon they are running along. Additionally, if defeated, each dragon drops a piece of itself.
These three bits of currencies are used to unlock and upgrade consumable objects that players will fly across on each dragon. Double jump boots, light and dark energy swords, loaves of bread, embiggening cookies, and pixel potions are just a handful of the twenty or so objects that can eventually be unlocked to supplement a run. Defeating a dragon for the first time or finding one of their eggs usually results in the post-run shop exclaiming that you have a new item that can be found.
Players are meant to feel a sense of reward after each and every run in EarthNight. Though ultimate victory at slaying the final dragon may not have been achieved, you should always take comfort in the fact that your time spent was not wasted. This is one of the keys in the game’s sense of accomplishment and why it is so thoughtfully put together. After my first complete run I managed to slay a few dragons before dying. Doing so, I had unlocked about three upgrades I could use on my next go round. Each time, my knowledge of enemies, how to sense changes in platforms, and when to better time jumps improved. Cleaversoft also designed the upgrade system to not be overbearing. Upgrades are not extremely costly and the types of dragons you have yet to slay and the items you are missing are clearly shown. Players will never be left in the dark on how to proceed to further unlock something. And those who hit a roadblock with harder dragons, large amounts of water can be used to unlock the initial item so progress is never halted too much.
These tangible upgrades not only ensure that you survive on a dragon longer, they help reach higher points where better secrets are held. Those who manage to maintain the longest and highest air could find themselves stumbling upon level skips or secret items that are extremely rare. One of the things I loved about EarthNight is that there so many things that the developers leave up to the player to discover. A change in music will signal a rare character appearing. A specific dragon will only show up in the game when the moon outside your actual window in real life is full. Health can be recovered by tapping your boots five times during a skydive. Does the game tell you any of this? No. Instead, it builds a sense of community and fosters those lightbulb moments where you feel accomplished for finally comprehending a deep secret, just like in the past.
Discovery in EarthNight is the fulfilling reward that will serve players through a large portion of the game as they work out its finely-tuned mechanics. Often, the game may feel like this mad dash of trying to collect all the brightly colored objects and dodge everything that looks mean. While that’s a fair assessment, there is a great deal of strategy involved in parsing out how to best tackle these dragons.
The first layer of the atmosphere players come across will always start out the same. The same thrilling music track plays along the same purple dragon. The most common, least aggressive enemies are in place that either stick right on the dragon’s back or slowly hover in the air. These are great moments to time jumps and enemy bounces as best as possible to get high up where the more valuable junk is and the potential for secrets feels less chaotic to get too. Maybe you will find a leaf that grants a 1-up or a level skip or that weird baby that grants you one piece of some random item. Eventually, the run ends and you get to the dragon’s head. In this flock of dangerous beasts, players will wait until Sydney fully charges up her dragon spirit or Stanley fully raises his sword and then go for a stab. Collecting at least one egg means the dragon will take more damage. Kill it and you get a dragon tooth.
Sydney or Stanley then jumps from the dragon’s head and dives into the sky where players can either try and select which dragon they land on next, or attempt to maneuver past them all and face the next layer of the atmosphere. The second layer amps up the difficulty with more frequent enemies, trickier jumps, and better rewards. Here, the dragons are made of stone and players mush feverishly mash the attack button to crack the dragon’s head open. In the third layer, there’s only one dragon to fight but now an enemy aggressively seeks out the player and the dragon’s back can become a hazard. In the fourth layer, enemies become dense and attack you with projectiles, there are more hollow platforms to hide in for safety, and the dragons are harder to fell. Finally, players will make it to the last stage, EarthNight, where they must defeat the EarthNight dragon. This section is an ultimate test of skill that is both punishing and rewarding in how it caters to precise timing and a good use of upgrades.
It’s possible to beat EarthNight from one dragon to the last in under 8 minutes (there’s a trophy for it after all). And for anyone who has spent any amount of time in the game, that is both a horrifying and exciting prospect. For it to happen, the stars must align and players must find a few level skips and perform flawlessly. But it goes to show that the simple rinse and repeat of killing dragons isn’t all that is contained within these levels. I love EarthNight for its simplicity but praise it for the complexities that come from understanding the foundations better. You only become a better player when you master the synergy behind items–like finally understanding the usefulness of a potion that turns everything pixelated–and catch on to how enemy AI can be manipulated to stay airborne.
Later levels certainly spike in difficulty but mainly as a balm to better prepare players for those harder challenges. Without playing through more of the easier stuff and not claiming upgrade materials, the latter half of the game just won’t be fun unless you have a lot of skill.
When stripping the layers of EarthNight and seeing what’s going on beneath the hood, I think more players will begin to appreciate just how insanely detailed this game is. Endless and auto-runners have to maintain a sense of action and momentum while not screwing over the player. If something in the programming breaks, players will be treated to the same exact jump or obstacle back-to-back or come upon an impossible chasm. Even the dino-running game that Google uses when the internet isn’t working keeps up with this standard, and it’s about as simple as they come.
Yet I’ve watched the flood of enemies and platforms on EarthNight unfold in front of me a few hundred times and have been dazzled at how they instantaneously react to what the player is doing. The programming will often place an enemy out of sight but right where the player may land if they just take a leap of faith. On good combos, a flood of chicken dragons or the like may come in and perfectly dive at the player to get them up in the air. You may miss a platform or an item by an inch just because you jumped at precisely the wrong moment. It’s fascinating to see that way that Cleaversoft designed the language of these platforming moments to work with the player. Though they may feel random, I got to the point where I began to understand that the game was both guiding and aiding me to victory more often than not. And despite the EarthNight dragon section feeling brutal, its logic makes sense when you really act with speed and a good sense of timing.
Of course, EarthNight may be one of the most pure and entertaining games that I have played but without its breathtaking aesthetic, it would have felt just a bit less magical. When I saw EarthNight several years ago at E3, I was captivated by its painted art style that moved and flowed with such grace. The fact that literally none of that has changed in all this time is astounding. Over 10,000 frames of painted art and animation have been put into this game and it shows. This fantasy world of mythical beasts overflows with imagination. You see the personality in each of the collectible objects, especially when your spaceship lobby fills with them over the course of the game. Sydney and Stanley move so fluidly and each enemy feels like a storybook character from any number of high-budget productions.
If there were only a dozen or so unique things to gawk at in EarthNight, it would feel less special. But Cleaversoft has truly given players a world to imagine themselves in and fill in the gaps of what they mean in this fiction. Maybe there is no explanation to the sunglasses-wearing space meatball or the disembodied bird head or the fact that the EarthNight dragon looks like a cat-wolf. But hell, I don’t care, it’s all incredible. The colors are vivid and smooth and bright and the game rarely hitches in the action. In short, this is one of the best looking games I’ve ever played.
Chipocrite, who performed the chiptune music for EarthNight, has also managed a similar feat. His musical themes fold themselves expertly into the action but never become tedious. Each layer of the atmosphere sticks with its own main theme along with a few variations. One may expect hearing the same exact song at the start of every game would become old, yet those themes etch themselves into your conscious by being both catchy and well-crafted. More importantly, Chipocrite’s music feels reflective of a past time of gaming while remaining fresh for a game of this magnitude.
EarthNight is a game that exists to be so immensely entertaining that you will look past any of its nearly insignificant issues. Strange collision detection or a bumpy level load are merely seeking complaints rather than valid problems that detract from a priceless value of fun. From the moment I got to play EarthNight all those years ago I kept my eye on it, frustrated that it was taking so long but hopeful that it meant more and more days of care were being put into it. I never expected a game this coherent, mesmerizing, and entertaining to come along. EarthNight is a serene, challenging, expertly-crafted achievement that should not be missed by any player.
