The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED]

The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED] adapts a past that never was to create a future that never came to be. This is a practical thesis for building a modern retro-themed game, but The Eternal Castle animates its esoteric references and strict guidelines with a euphoric nose dive into its revered generation. Four color CGA-style graphics align with the plodding, deliberate animation of Delphine’s Another World and Flashback and performs a Top Gun high-five with period-appropriate cinematic violence and hypnotizing synthesizers.  The impact is severe but the fallout is marvelous.

Story opens with a premise and then subsists entirely on inference. According to the acutely hard-to-parse text, in the year 2000 climate change and nuclear war decimated the surface of earth. Colonization operations in space eventually returned humans to the surface to scour the wreckage and decay, but they never returned. A member of this team was special to your male or female protagonist, prompting your crash-landing arrival on the ruined planet.

The Eternal Castle’s vision of the post-apocalypse relies heavily on artistic suggestion. Dealing in four colors necessitates a sharp application of pseudo-three dimensional objects and exaggerated shading, creating artificial depth with the background and recognizable textures in the foreground. It’s easy to appreciate a crashed jet engine, a haunted staircase in a ravaged mansion, and abandoned bunkers in 2D space while admiring blown-out skyscrapers, incinerated forests, and collapsed infrastructure in the infinite backdrop.

Style is the story. It speaks in an escalating sequence of dread-wrecked mad science, heroic 80’s action cinema, and the universal rot of urban decay. Most people you encounter want to kill you while some, oddly, seem to have no interest in violence. I received warnings on occasion but never had (or couldn’t find) a verb to avoid conflict. This sets up The Eternal Castle’s questionable morality and its protagonist’s mission to find his target at any cost necessary. None of this is original but all of it is impressive. The Eternal Castle’s isn’t shy about its influences and honors them with its undeniably dramatic procession of styles.

Commitment is visible in its operation. The Eternal Castle moves, relative to 2D action platformers of 2018, like molasses. Jumps are deliberately measured and must be performed with significant foresight. Running, which consumes stamina, complicates the process. The Eternal Castle pays homage to Delphine’s single-screen platformers (or Abe’s Odyssey if you’re a bit younger) where each objective “room” was a mixture of puzzle and action. When to make a move is usually as important as the performing said action.

The Eternal Castle has three core levels, each with wildly different themes. The Unholy Church is rife with gross human experimentation, producing unruly mobs of mindless melee thrashers. Ancient Ruins creates jumping and timing puzzles amidst gangs of lightly armed natives. Forgotten City shifts the pallet to rust and teal as it doubles down on heavy infantry. Chase sequences, boss encounters, puzzle escape rooms, instant-death traps, and colossal violence are in no short supply. The Eternal Castle is good about checkpoints, typically creating one before every point of major trial-and-error or conflict.

Combat is an area where The Eternal Castle’s imposed limitations reach a premature end. Melee weapons like axes and hammers provide upgrades over a simple punch combo. Pistols, rifles, and shotguns serve as projectiles for longer range targets. Melee combat—other than the Unholy Church boss fight, which is brilliant—is more effective as mindless mashing than focused strategy while guns project questionable effectiveness. I could never really tell why some shots connected and some didn’t. In either case combat is rarely an obstacle and more of a sequence for The Eternal Castle to showcase its style. Do you remember the Hallway-And-A-Hammer sequence from Oldboy? Would you like to do that in a neon CGA strobe light rave? I would, and I did.

A brooding synthwave soundtrack matches The Eternal Castle’s cinematic foundation. While it spends most of its time letting the ambient noise of isolation fill its environment, moments of climax and action are highlighted with synth crunching tracks that mirror work from either Carpenter Brut or Perturbator. It’s yet another indulgence in which The Eternal Castle bows to expectations. It also, obviously, works quite well in the context of its pulpy action.

The Eternal Castle is wise to keep its run-time under three hours. Its mechanics aren’t built for a long term investment and it wraps up, with a creative yet unexpected means of conducting its final fight, as soon as it extinguishes every other idea it could manage under its limitations. Collectibles in the form of tiny pixels and minor character upgrades (like a bullet proof vest or a stealth-enabling cape) are tucked in The Eternal Castle’s more obscure corners, if you’re willing to look for them.

Is actual history or implied history more important? Despite its title as [REMASTERED], the original The Eternal Castle probably doesn’t exist. Likewise, CGA color pallets were rarely quite this restrictive and none of its would-be contemporaries managed a comparable soundtrack. Checkpoints weren’t as generous and violence wasn’t as exaggerated. Animation was never this good. None of this matters. The Eternal Castle exists to serve a highly specific void.

The Eternal Castle is obsessed with the idea of feeling like a game pulled from either the late 80’s or early 90’s. It compiles successful hallmarks of that time in gaming and culture and rewrites them as an ode to a highly specific time and place in the minds of its creators. It’s more fun romanticize history than perfectly recall history, which is a method of operation that only really works in entertainment. The Eternal Castle is a remaster of everything and also nothing, and it’s immensely successful from either perspective.