The Eternal Cylinder – Review
Signs of an interview I did with ACE Team about their bizarre beat ’em up sequel, Zeno Clash 2, can be found buried deep in the endless sediment of the ancient, fossilised internet. “aesthetic choices have been intentionally made to make our game stand out from the mass of traditional fantasy games that continue to mimic each other,” Carlos Bordeu, the company’s founder, said at the end of the interview. Almost a decade later, with Bordeu now serving as the game director of The Eternal Cylinder, a game about a giant cylinder, I think it’s safe to say that these same decisions have been made.
Is the central focus really on a gigantic tube, though? And what does this latest Ace Team expedition into the unknown amount to, given such offbeat decisions? Let’s find out.
Truth be told, the bipedal not-people known as trebhum (with their trunk-like snouts) are the emotional and gameplay heart of this lovely, remarkably approachable game, rather than the giant cylinder that is crushing a colourful alien world beneath its red hot immensity (the titular antagonist).
The Eternal Cylinder’s execution is less strange than its premise would lead one to expect. On a purely tactile, moment-to-moment gaming level, it does feel immediately less unusual to play than the Zeno Clashes or even Abyss Odyssey. For anyone who has run and jumped around in a third-person game, the controls will feel natural, and the cycle of gathering resources has become second nature.
Your job as a trebhum is to keep yourself alive and help other trebhum by hatching eggs, reviving them, or setting them free. Once you recruit them, they’ll follow you around and you can swap between them at will, giving you more flexibility to deal with the game’s challenges and a backup plan if your main character meets an untimely end. Unfortunately, little snoutbeasts don’t always make it, but if one does, it can lead to the survival of the rest with the help of a peculiar altar and a stomachful of crystal dust. Further, you need to evolve so as to survive the harsh conditions of the alien world and its ecosystem of bizarre creatures that chomp and wallop their way across the landscape.
To make this conceit work, the Eternal Cylinder has snorted up elements from the survival genre. You have to keep moving forward in order to avoid being crushed, so the experience is more linear than in other survival games. However, the cylinder stops at various points, allowing you to explore a narrow strip of land in front of it while you hunt for food and make the most of the limited resources at your disposal.
Indeed, stomachs. Background gameplay consists of eating, or at least sucking things into storage and then pumping them directly into… another hole. Some foods cause changes in your trebhum that are even more noticeable than the effect of restoring energy levels. To clarify, this is not evolution in the sense of natural selection (phew), but rather one in which you alter your creatures to suit your ever-changing wants and needs by consuming various cubes, crystals, seeds, and strange fungus. There are mutations that have no overt effects on the individual but help them travel greater distances or faster, such as an increase in stamina or the development of fur to protect against cold. More dramatically, there are numerous set pieces throughout the game that require you to evolve in order to defeat them, such as a switch that requires you to transform into a cube in order to activate it, a puzzle that necessitates sucker feet in order to reach the goal, or an obstacle that must be inflated like a balloon in order to float over the vast dead body of some sort of infinite space eel that lies decomposing in the sea ahead of you. While some of these set pieces are creative and enjoyable, others are merely annoying.
You’ll find a wide variety of useful mutations among this large collection. In some ways, I feared getting lost in the system’s intricacies, but in the end, I was pleasantly surprised by how rarely I ended up in situations where I died unjustly because I didn’t have the right mutations selected. However, I was torn between the feelings of awe and overwhelm at the adaption system’s vast array of special abilities and the frustration that there wasn’t enough opportunity to fully utilise those abilities. Rarely did I feel like I had a chance to delve into that and put my knowledge to use.
The Eternal Cylinder seems torn between its brilliant central premise of the cylinder itself (I mean, look at it! ), the need to make a game that showcases Ace Team’s extraordinary creative and game design talents, and the requirements of creating an engaging game with a loveable central character. There will be tension in the game as a result of these factors. There were times when I was at a loss for what to do, and I got the impression that some features of the game were incomplete “stubs.” But it’s a deep game, full of twists and turns that surprised me.
The game’s well-written and engaging narrative is a huge plus, and it’s also a big reason why I enjoyed it so much (a significant contributor to which, Jonas Kyratzes, has produced work you might have encountered before in The Sea Will Claim Everything and The Talos Principle). This narrative spans the entirety of the game. There are genuine shock moments, substantial mysteries, and horrifying depictions inside. The story is filled with the wonder of a child and the warmth of a well-loved bedtime tale. Nonetheless, it’s outfitted with the roving nightmare elements that give Ace Team their formidable aesthetic power. Sometimes I was really awkward and worried sick about my stumbling loved ones.
Despite this, the narrative of The Eternal Cylinder is never the focus of the film. What you see in the camera, this colourful world being flattened, is the star of the show, even if the story encompasses it and wraps everything in the kind of friendly narrative glow that is often lacking in other games. In the end, I think The Eternal Cylinder is a vehicle for Ace Team’s tremendous aesthetic power. This is the most important reason for you to get The Eternal Cylinder and enjoy it.
Wonderful ideas and bizarre set pieces litter the doomed landscapes of The Eternal Cylinder, from electric death-worm dragon things hanging from the sky to perpetual motion half-pipes in which weird creatures get crushed as we flee from the de-evolving headlights of a car powered by human arms to a monstrous giant with what looks like an exploded train for a head (that is actually a portal to some weird story-device dimension), and even a kaiju. It’s a beautiful thing to figure out how to use a monster’s powers to your benefit. The suspense and pleasure come from the gradual unveilings and teasing gaps in knowledge. The world-building is typical Ace Team—a mediaeval painting of Hell—but it’s also super cute this time around.
Saying that the game is merely a visual showcase is not to downplay its importance; it will undoubtedly be among the year’s Most Interesting Games. However, I think there are a few other games in our immediate ecosystem that will earn more attention than The Eternal Cylinder simply by being hipper in a more obvious way. A game designer friend of mine with an occasionally cynical disposition said to me, “It looks and sounds like Spore,” which is inaccurate, perhaps unflattering, certainly unhelpful, but… also not entirely unfair. The Eternal Cylinder is delightful and offbeat in a way that seems just off-zeitgeist.
So maybe the real message of The Eternal Cylinder is that the creative spirit will take any shape it needs to in order to escape the forces that seek to squash it, and that Ace Team is one of the odd families that is following that light into the future. Just the fact that Ace Team has been able to keep making these fantastic games is reason enough to celebrate, push ourselves toward growth, and invest in The Eternal Cylinder. And you should if even a sliver of what I’ve described about this game piques your interest.
