Summum Aeterna Review (PS5)

At the start of 2022, I had the pleasure of reviewing Aeterna Noctis, Aeternum Game Studios’ premiere hand-drawn Metroidvania. The Spanish independent developer’s game was equally as difficult as it was fun, testing my skills in platforming and slaying bosses all the while I was exploring a world torn asunder by the forces of darkness and light. Spoiler alert – it earned a 9 from me; I loved how it made me feel like I was a good player despite losing to bosses and challenging platforming segments over, over, and over again. If you have been following my reviews since then, such as CONVERGENCE: A League of Legends Story or Sifu, you may have seen me give Aeterna Noctis a mention when discussing the game’s difficulty. It’s well deserved simply because of how Aeterna Noctis challenged the hell out of me without turning into a frustrating experience. It is delightfully difficult. It’s my personal gold standard for what good difficulty should be instead of the artificially hard gameplay mechanics that serve to frustrate rather than challenge players.

Seeing as my Noctis experience involved a great wealth of trial and error, it would seem like I was describing a roguelike during my review of that challenging Metroidvania. Roguelikes are the premier gaming genre for players wanting bite-sized, sometimes challenging, yet unique adventures testing players’ patience, dexterity, and timing. Aeterna Noctis was not a roguelike by any stretch of the imagination, but what if one existed in its universe? Well, as it turns out, Aeternum Game Studios has returned with another game: Summum Aeterna. Spoiler alert number 2: It’s a roguelike!

Summum Aeterna is the prequel to Noctis, telling the story of how the King of Darkness ended up in his position at the start of Noctis as a near-human, stripped of his power. Thankfully, you don’t need to have completed, or even played, Noctis to understand the world of Summum Aeterna. But, if you have played Aeterna Noctis, some of the enemies and levels within this roguelike will feel moderately familiar. This now begs the question: How does Summum Aeterna hold up as a roguelike within Aeternum Game Studios’ universe?

Short answer? Sort of well. Not the best, but nowhere near terrible.

Long answer? Read on.

I’ve spent over a week playing Summum Aeterna and experiencing the roguelike standard of dying over, over, and over again. Each death started me over in Famished Town – the starting area of Aeterna Noctis that is currently teeming with life. Controlling the King of Darkness felt familiar, albeit slightly less clunky than my initial foray into the Aeterna universe. In Summum Aeterna, I could double jump, dash through hazards and enemies, and attack. Simple, right?

Not really. The first ten hours I spent in Summum exposed me to additional mechanics with each new run, some more confusing than others. If Starfield hurt your brain because of the information overload of its first 15 hours, this experience should feel similar. It gets to the point where there are six types of currency that can be spent at six different vendors. More on that later, but it’s quite overwhelming at first.

The general gameplay loop of Summum Aeterna puts the player into a starting biome full of randomly generated rooms. Most rooms have enemies, some have chests that grant gold and some health, while other rooms can be weapon upgrade shops that charge gold or nothing at all.

Summum’s three basic weapons were available for me right at the start, thankfully, meaning I didn’t have to grind too much to begin to feel like runs were evolving with me. The sword is a button masher’s dream, only requiring a couple of presses before enemies were stunned. Its secondary ability functions like Noctis’ Crystal Arrows in which the sword is thrown and can be teleported to. The scythe returns, too, offering slower cleaves but dealing damage in a wider area. The handguns/bows offer ranged options and automatically target enemies but not giving you the ability to aim, so you can (and will) miss.

Weapons can also vary by their passive abilities, with some having innate abilities like automatically applying a burn damage over time but dealing slightly less base damage. These weapon variations function similarly to Hades’ weapon forms without the need to upgrade each individual form through grinding away.

Once I got used to what each weapon generally did, I was exposed to another level of variance of Summum’s gameplay – its weapon modification system. Each weapon has a set number of notches that can be upgraded with gems. These gems vary from adding additional base damage, amping elemental damage, to increasing your attack/movement speed. These weapons can feel quite good if you get the combinations just right because of how well they reward specialization.

Here’s the catch, though. Should you decide to swap your weapon mid-run in a shop or as a result of defeating a boss, only one gem can be transferred between weapons. Just one! Everything else on your current weapon disappears into the aether. If you see free weapons, you can “sell” them for gold in case you don’t want them but want to walk away with something else. It’s nice to exchange unneeded weapons and gems like that; the decision of choosing which gem to pass on to a new weapon is nice, too.

In between runs I was taken to Famished Town, the main hub of Summum Aeterna. I could test any weapon and gem I had unlocked thus far on a talking dummy. The merchants of Famished Town ranged from a living forge where I could upgrade the base stats of the basic weapons, two fountains that offered me permanent power, a chaos realm that offered me additional permanent power, and an NPC that taught me how the levels (called World Seeds) worked. An NPC armorer who upgraded my personal collection of armor that, when combined with other armor pieces from the same set, granted additional stats. There were some little hidden secrets here and there, but Famished Town was much more utilitarian than it was teeming with character and charm.

You should expect Aeterna Summum’s variance to evolve with the player’s progress. It gets to a point where end-game runs introduce some chaos in the form of unpredictable tarot cards that can literally eliminate all enemies in the next room or grant them bonus health, halve your health or grant you up to half of your missing health, all the way to impacting the next boss battle. A deathly NPC can be encountered on your later runs who can inflict you with a temporary curse (that can be lifted, don’t worry) along with additional power.

Thus far, this review should read as though Summum gives the player just as much permanent power as it does variance in each run. It does. The difficulty of Summum is found in its early game thanks to its level designs and the World Seed system.

Aeterna Summum’s major roguelike uniqueness is that of its World Seed system. The gist of this system makes it so that each run is inherently unique with bonuses and detriments, such as receiving additional gold while traps dealing more damage, while also changing up the order in which biomes are presented to the player. As of writing, there are five biomes, meaning that there are five types of seeds the player can select. The higher leveled seeds have more boons and curses, upping the ante of the risk/reward paradigm for players to consider as they become familiar with the game’s mechanics and general gameplay loop.

It’s interesting to have that level of freedom to choose the “starting world” of any given run, even more when each seed’s boon and hindrance can be shifted, too. Roguelikes often restrict the amount of agency given to the player to ensure a run’s freshness and preventing players from gaining power too quickly. I used this to my advantage, selecting seeds from certain biomes because I knew some bosses were relatively easier than others.

On paper, you would also assume that the levels were drastically different from each other, be it enemies, traps, and layouts. I quickly learned that biomes followed the same patterns and featured minor deviations from each other, most specifically in the enemy diversity and boss department. This is unfortunate, since I wanted levels to feel different from each other beyond spongier enemies that hit harder. Each biome has three consistent world phases, the first of which can be quickly blown through without needing to defeat each enemy. The second phase in the biome requires players to fully explore the world to find several keys to unlock the door to the boss. Some second phases had mini bosses that guarded the keys, while other second phases left the keys lying about willy nilly. Regardless, selecting World Seeds felt less meaningful and more of a “which boon do I want to start with?” or “which boss do I want to face, first?”

I’m most disappointed with Summum Aeterna’s level design and platforming, to be honest. Aeterna Noctis had trained me to become a platforming pro, involving timing jumps, bouncing on enemies with my sword, to multi-phase hard-hitting boss fights with clearly-telegraphed attack patterns. These skills were not needed in Summum because the platforming aspects were mediocre at best. The few times I needed to time a dash and double jump felt good but never paid off like it did in Noctis.

This is to say that Summum Aeterna is a slightly missed opportunity in blending challenge, roguelike mechanics, and platforming. Compared to Rogue Legacy 2, a roguelike meets Metroidvania requiring quite a good amount of time, patience, and dexterity, Summum’s platforming and roguelike mechanics feel less fleshed out while still being difficult to master. I would love to see harder and more level-specific platforming segments straight out of Aeterna Noctis’ Trials of the Kings but with a roguelike spin.

I know Aeternum can create some difficult gameplay loops, but that difficulty needs to be consistent and pay off. In my preview of Rightfully, Beary Arms, I critiqued its current system of granting detriments at the start of each run because of how it kicked me while I was down after dying to a boss or a hazard. In Summum, the pain of a new detriment was masked by the benefit of additional gold. There reached a point at around hour 12 where the difficulty curve rubberbanded in a way I did not expect: The passive power I had built over the period of my 12 hours had surpassed the number of curses that were placed on the world seed I had selected. My runs went from being ~20 minutes at a time to spanning upwards of an hour, sometimes more if I chose to clear each room in its entirety. As such, my runs went from granting a slow drip of currency to be spent on permanent upgrades into a literal waterfall of rewards in the form of multiple world seeds, aesthetic armor that changed my look, and armor that granted permanent strength…

…but I couldn’t use all of the currency and seeds at once. Each run requires one single seed (two if you’re combining seeds), unlocking some aesthetic armor and permanent weapon upgrades cost a ton of currency that will require quite a bit of grinding. It’s fun grinding, sure, but it’s a lot, nonetheless. Getting that many rewards while not having much to do with them feels weird because in some ways, you can spend some of that currency immediately while the rest will sit around until you can unlock something big.

This rubberbanding effect of obtaining power also made bosses feel like walks in the park. If I had the right combination of weapon and upgrade gems, I could literally stand in one place during a boss battle and button mash away with little regard to my health. Cheesing boss battles like this chipped away the relief and feelings of accomplishment I expected to feel when completing a gauntlet. Roguelike bosses should feel difficult, yes, and their power should scale with the player to ensure that a challenge is omnipresent. In true Aeterna fashion, there is a hard mode, but I’m unsure how much of the hard mode can overcome the current damage numbers of weapon combinations.

What kind of roguelike is Summum Aeterna, then? It’s not the most lore-driven like Hades, nor is it an exercise in chaos and min-maxing stats akin to Vampire Survivors or Risk of Rain 2. Its platforming and level designs are middling, very similar to Have a Nice Death without the charm of Death Inc. and its talking elevator ghost. The world crawling of the world seed system is a good foundation but is limited by general level designs lacking depth, variety, and difficulty. The mechanics, while hard to learn at first, all add permanent power and chaos to the player’s future runs. It’s a weird experience to go from feeling powerless to feeling overpowered in this fashion. But it works. It ever so slightly hits the roguelike spot of being excited for just one more run despite a crushing loss.

Summum Aeterna is a good, but slightly difficult, roguelike that takes place in the universe of Aeterna Noctis. While it doesn’t fully succeed in its world crawling fantasy of selecting starting biomes with benefits and detriments, it definitely removes much of the roguelike frustrations by giving the player permanent power in many forms. It’s a gorgeous roguelike I can see myself returning to just so I can feel powerful, albeit not as powerful as I felt while playing Aeterna Noctis.

A review key of Summum Aeterna was provided by the publisher for the sole purpose of this DigitalChumps review.