Price: £ 21.99
Developer: As
Editor: Good Shepherd Entertainment
Platform: PC, PS4, Xbox One
Revised version: personal computer
The eternal cylinder is undoubtedly the strangest game I have played this year. It is a game in which you play a sensitive trunk that is hunted by giant mouths and hybrid cars, everything while being implacable by a huge crusher of planets. It is a fascinating experience, simultaneously charming and terrifying, combining incredible art with life themes among ecological disaster. It is not a brilliant game, but only at its weakest, it is never less than captivating.
That sentence trunk that I mentioned is real called Trebhum, a small alien on squatting a world that slowly crushed powder by an unstoppable cylinder that extends to the horizon. I am not very sure of how it works geometrically, although this is quite far from the logical obstacle line that the eternal cylinder jumps with gay abandonment.
Its broad goal is to survive, but the eternal cylinder is not structured as other survival games. The omnipresence of the cylinder in an entire axis of the world forces the game in a more linear way that most survive, with you constantly advancing while the cylinder pursues it, crushing trees and structures and the soil itself.
Well, not constantly. You can find small bubbles of sanctuary in the towers, which stop the progress of the cylinder whenever it remains within its sphere of blue influence. These towers not only sacrifice the respite for Trebhum, but also provide opportunities to explore and evolve. Using its trunks, the Trebhum can absorb different types of edible objects, reproduction issue in its stomachs. Some provide health, while others provide energy used to flee the cylinder. But some of these objects will make Trebhum put, giving them longer legs for larger jumps, or fur to keep them hot in cold areas of the world. There is even a mutation that makes Trebhums a cube that, in addition to helping them solve certain puzzles, is also extremely fun.
It is only your Trebhum that also does not benefit from these mutations. As you advance in the world, your Trebhum will find other trebhums that can join your family in the right circumstances. Some may hatch from eggs by placing them in a kind of incubation flower, while others should be revived with a magical crystal, or persuade their houses shaped by bubbles by providing them with the correct resources.
There are pragmatic reasons to do this: there are certain passages in the world that require at least three trebhums to unlock them, while it will also assume control of another trebhum if its group leader is killed. But mainly you do not want the cylinder to be beautiful theses and small aliens in the pasta. Your Trebhum companions are the crux of the most emerging moments of the game. For example, my initial trebhum was killed by a predator within the first half hour of the game, and it was not until much later that I could relive it in a Trebhum sanctuary, which was felt as a special moment.
It is a game full of intelligent ideas, although some of them are more fun in theory than in practice. Playing how these evolving creatures are not as fun as it seems initially. A big problem is that Trebhum is not partially satisfactory to control. Acquiring better jump legs is only fun if the jump feels good to start, and many of the mutations suffer from being disappointing under the fingers. The community side of the game is equally simplistic. Beyond opening The Odd to and serve as additional lives, his companions Trebhum don’t do much in the game moment by moment.
However, although disappointing mechanics, the eternal cylinder is rescued from tedium for its structure and story narration. The wide history of the Trebhum trip is the context of a brilliant narrative, which gradually reveals the complex and surprisingly emotional story of this resistant and adaptable alien breed. Meanwhile, the progression of the next tower generally triggers a unique event that makes the game feel fresh, like a giant snake that descends from the sky, or something that emerges behind the cylinder.
The world itself is also intriguing. The planet in which the game is carried out resembles a collaborative art project between Salvador Dali and HariOmus Bosch, a surreal landscape landscape where something strange is a corner in each corner of the frame. There are samples of flying snacks, snails that can biserate the Themelves and then gather like a staircase of bears. You will walk towards what looks like a giant pink rock, just to divide sally open in the background, revealing rows of human teeth. And yet, nothing here feels random, the color palette and the meticulous landscape make this fundamentally impossible world feel consistent and credible.
Then, or of course, there is the cylinder itself, possible the most terrifying adversary as xenomorphic alien insulation. When moving in motion, the entire length shines an infernal orange, illuminating the entire horizon in curvilinear infernal fire. It is also terribly easy to underestimate, starting slowly and then accelerating suddenly, its roar becomes a deafening roar when you approach your small alien tribe. You can almost feel the heat of your screen, as it illuminates the backs of its trebhums, the camera shakes uncontrolphant while fighting desperately for the safety of the next tower. It is a horrible and fascinating phenomenon, simultaneously impossible to look and impossible to look the other way.
It is a pity that the underlying systems of the eternal cylinder do not give up at the coastal level as their art and narration of stories, because otherwise you would be looking at a stone masterpiece. However, the eternal cylinder remains an intelligent, unique and spectacular experience, while its unforgettable prismatic enemy pursues its nightmares for the coming week.
