Eternights, an action game with dating sim elements set on an apocalyptic modern world, is a surprisingly okay game despite its shortcomings. Read on to see if its features are worth your money in our First Impressions review.

Eternights Review and Score Explanation

Eternights Score Explanation

Eternights Review: The Night Isn’t Deep, Just Pretty

As games with "anime-like" aesthetics are becoming increasingly popular, there will inevitably be a pecking order for games that stand out above the rest. This can be seen from the wildly popular mobile games Genshin Impact and Honkai: Star Rail to the console games with decently sizable followings, such as the Disgaea and Fire Emblem series.

Of course, there's no need for these games to be developed by a large team to gain popularity. Many notable examples of indie-developed anime games that have gained a lot of traction over the years include Doki Doki Literature Club and Little Witch Nobeta. And now, it seems like Eternights, a game by indie developer Studio Sai, seeks to make a name for itself and stand among those at the top.

But unfortunately for Eternights, it seems to have misunderstood what made those popular games so prolific. It's not simply a matter of looking good or sounding nice. And no, it's rarely ever about fulfilling some sort of fantasy. These games are judged on the same thing that all other games are subject to: quality.

It has to at least be great at one of the things it's supposed to be good at. Like, there's no need to pressure Disgaea to have an excellent story when it's just supposed to be a time sink for level grind-loving masochists (me) and enthusiasts of power fantasy. The grind in Disgaea is satisfying and the skill animations mind-blowing.

Eternights is a beautiful game. But that's basically it. That description encompasses every aspect of the game, from its story to its design. It uses tropes excessively without fully utilizing their potential, delivering a very surface-level experience to its players.

Does that make it a bad game? Of course not. After all, being pretty is a great quality in itself. However, tropes are meant to be a template for developers to build on. Eternights simply uses them as they are, neglecting to fill in more details that would make these cliche, formulaic tropes into deep, more meaningful and memorable aspects.

The end result is an ultimately average game, replete with questionable continuities, jarring gameplay, and incomplete stories. Despite all these issues, it still miraculously culminates into an okay game that's enjoyable in its own right.

Pros of Eternights

Things Eternights Got Right
Amazing Audiovisuals Relatable Backstories Entertaining Interactions

Amazing Audiovisuals

Eternights is set in a post-apocalyptic modern society where people have mutated into horrible monsters with varying numbers of appendages, and the cities have been ruined into an abominable hellscape resembling a Walmart after a Black Friday Sale. The game delivers this vibe quite well, with its generous use of dark corridors, scant lighting, warm colors, and thick fog. You'll immediately know that everything around you is either dead or has become a monster the moment you take full control of your character.

In a strange way, this touch is only enhanced by the game's enemy designs, which take the term "body horror" quite literally, with each baddie being shaped out of dismembered or flayed body parts. While none of them look particularly terrifying, they do at least look cool, so you can play in peace knowing that mutated humans still know how to look stylish.
Well, at least until you see them writhe and spasm uncontrollably on the ground.

Eternights also features, among a few other things, cutscenes of both the fully-animated 2D kind and the relatively lower-effort 3D kind. While the latter isn't anything noteworthy to talk about, the 2D cutscenes are well-made enough to be praiseworthy. If only they had all of its cutscenes animated similarly, it could elevate the game enough to be truly special.

The voice acting in Eternights is also absolutely astounding. This is all thanks to its star-studded cast of voice actors and actresses who bring life to the game's characters. If the audio could have been scored purely from the quality of the voice acting, it would have earned an easy nine or even a ten. Certain pieces from its soundtrack are also bangers, and its few songs are catchy enough to make me want to dig through the internet and add it to my personally curated playlist. Everything else… Well, it does the job at least.

Relatable Backstories

As you would expect from a game about teenagers tasked with saving the world, most of them carry a heavy weight on their shoulders. This influences how you, the protagonist, must treat them to develop your relationship.

But what's actually surprising about this is how well-defined their problems are. Not only are they quite realistic, but they're also intrinsically relatable to any ordinary person despite the in-game characters' special circumstances. This ranges from loneliness due to their inability to make friends, self-esteem problems because of cowardice, guilt from abandoning others, and much more.

While nothing they present is novel and exciting, the mere fact that your romantic interests are able to display a level of humanity that's both sensible and engaging allows the dating sim elements of the game to be treated almost like a real-life simulation.

Entertaining Interactions

If you can turn off your brain and get past the game's shallow writing, there's actually a pleasant amount of fun interactions you can witness throughout the game. This not only rings true between the main cast, but also with the other side characters you'll meet as you progress through the game.

Although it's unsurprisingly full of immature remarks heading off into confusing directions, it works well and is quite endearing when you consider the fact that the main cast is just a group of teenagers. Even if some of them have the backstories of disillusioned adults, they still manage to retain a tumultuous, almost plastic nature, typical of people their age.

And honestly, though I ripped into the game for its story, the endgame sequence and epilogue are pretty good. Compelling, even.

The juxtaposition between their perilous circumstances and their almost inappropriately childish natures endows the game with an enjoyable contrast. I would even go as far as to say it’s the proper mindset to have. Because even when faced with certain doom, there's no use wallowing in gloom (hey, that rhymed). It would only negatively affect everybody's mood and mental wellbeing, potentially dulling you during critical moments. Regardless of the method, whether it's the juvenile antics or the confusing romance, it provides some levity to the game. And, just like how you can only appreciate brightness because darkness exists, it’s thanks to this light-heartedness that you can feel the gravity of their dire situation.

Cons of Eternights

Things That Eternights Can Improve
Sound Effects And Character Quips Fall Flat Below Average Combat Experience Cringe-Worthy Writing The Game Leaves You With More Questions Than Answers

Sound Effects And Character Quips Fall Flat

This might be confusing considering I just praised its audio. Eternights' overall audio experience is a mixed bag of amazement and disappointment. Sure, the voice acting is incredible, and certain music from its soundtrack can almost hit as hard as those "isekai" trucks that can take you to another world, it suffers from its usage of extremely generic sound effects and annoyingly persistent character quips. The latter, in particular, happens so often that you'll likely grow tired of the voice acting's excellent quality within a few hours.

While you could argue that your companions' persistent post-encounter dialogues add a bit of color to the dull, post-apocalyptic landscape, I'd like to add that there are only a few lines they could speak, depending on the situation. It wouldn't be strange to hear the same thing three times in a row within the same dungeon-crawling session.

As for the game's sound effects, they're just… there. It doesn't feel like they're specially made for the occasion, or perhaps its creation was just to ensure a complete set of sound effects to work with. It just lacks personality.

Below Average Combat Experience

Unlike Eternights' audio, which is technically salvageable by its fantastic voice acting and soundtrack, its combat experience is unfortunately too far gone to save it.

While the game provides you with a myriad of abilities through your companions' powers, little care was taken to enhance the quality of your experience using them. For example, when you unleash your Elemental Fist, which will be your primary method of breaking barriers, the camera angles used are so bad that they might as well count as one of the bosses in the game. It's set so that you'll have no idea what the hell either you or your companions are doing. It also shakes so severely that you just can't see anything properly.

To add to these problems, the combat experience itself is painfully average. Your attacks, special moves, and usage of the Elemental Fist are primarily bogged down by sloppy quirks that will challenge your patience. For instance, one offender is its lock-on mechanic, which demands that you face your camera toward the enemy you want to target. This could have been improved by leaps and bounds by prioritizing the target that your character is physically facing instead and panning the camera toward it afterward.

And even if you do get a lock on your enemy, it'll disappear the instant something even momentarily blocks your line of sight from the part of the enemy you've set your sights on. Yes, even the humble telephone pole will break your lock-on if it crosses that thin line between you and the baddie.

On top of that, the combat is fast-paced, but the companion skills execute at a snail’s pace that it quickly kills all momentum.

And speaking of companions, they don’t actually do anything for you other than wait for your command to cast magic. That’s it. They don’t participate in combat other than when you explicitly command them to. The enemies are even completely aware of this by completely ignoring them. That’s such a shame when you’re able to take your companions, endowed with different abilities by the Architect, out on missions. It would have made the otherwise dull combat a bit more lively.

Cringe Writing

One of Eternights' essential tasks is for you to raise or improve your bonds with your team as you progress through the mission. This involves simply hanging out with them and answering with the proper dialogue choices, training with them through different minigames, or scavenging for certain items they'll need for their everyday life.

In other words, Eternights is partly a dating simulator. Shocker, right? I know. Unfortunately, this also means that it suffers from the same plague many games of the genre are infected with: cringe.

Most of the game's story segments are thus riddled with dumb dialogue that you'll have to sit through to progress. These include the characters laughing profusely at blatantly unfunny jokes, your romantic interests blushing over the strangest or the subtlest of smutty references, etc. Have I mentioned that there's a gratuitous amount of lascivious scenes? Not only that, some are unwarranted at times and completely absent when they aren't. Strange.

They're also prone to making the dumbest responses in an attempt to have a little humor in the writing. However… I suppose in a certain way, this could be taken as a pro. The game's inappropriate humor does have an audience, after all.

It's not as if every dating simulator suffers from this problem. It all depends on the quality of the game's writing. There are a multitude of remarkable dating simulators that aren't plagued by this issue, and they're not just limited to visual novels, where excellent writing is essentially a requirement to be great. Sure, maybe I’m a little biased, but honestly, Eternights just unfortunately fails to make the cut.

And what is up with your last romantic interest only getting attention during the game's last few days? I don't know about you, but it certainly seems like they got royally screwed.

The Game Leaves You With More Questions Than Answers

Perhaps due to limitations imposed by its game design, Eternights's progress is littered with baffling, eyebrow-raising developments that even a barely attentive gamer would notice. For example, what the hell is Eternights, really? Not the game, but the actual object in the game. How does the core and totem work? What exactly is the relationship between the Architects Umbra and Lux that they can’t co-exist? How the hell is a random train parked in a subway/shelter suddenly equipped with this high-tech gadget that is able to measure the levels of Umbra, a malevolent pseudo-substance, in the air when the world-ending scenario only happened recently? And why the hell do these mutant abominations use a giant color-matching puzzle minigame and a StepManiaX machine (which is presented in a way that barely resembles as a rhythm minigame) to protect their bridges and doors?

So many questions, so little in-game time.

While the latter problem can be explained away by a modern game's unreasonable need to have puzzle minigames (I'm looking at you, Resident Evil), the issues with the story's loopholes and continuity errors are much trickier. It's not even an excuse to say that they'll be "explained later" since the opportune moments to do so have long passed before these problems became apparent.

This might have been caused by Eternights' need to throw you into the meat of the game without suffering a prolonged cutscene to explain every little thing. Or, maybe, it's not meant to be explained at all, given that those pieces of information are not entirely essential for the game's conclusion.

But even if that’s the case, I still think they should be explained. Do they expect you to nosedive right in without knowing anything about the world? Just because certain items are merely plot devices doesn't mean you don’t need to know about how they work or even what they are. Context is essential to truly immerse yourself in the fictional world around you. And these must be presented at the correct times to make the experience memorable.

Eternights Overview & Premise

On the way to his first date, our protagonist suddenly finds himself amid a global apocalypse. An airborne malignancy called Umbra infects everybody on the planet, twisting their forms into abominations that seek to kill everything around them. Desperate to survive, the protagonist escapes their failing shelter with his friends and gets caught up in the Architect's, the designer of humanity's souls, plans to save the world.

Who Should Play Eternights?

Eternights is Recommended if You Enjoy:

• Tokyo Xanadu
• Persona Series
• Agarest: Generations of War

If you enjoy dating sim elements to your action game, then Eternights is for you. Be warned, though. The game is quite halfhearted about what it wants to be. Though it has the kind of dumb dialogue that certain people would enjoy, it lacks the honesty that Persona has. It also doesn't commit to being a serious action game, either. Overall, the experience is just average, only propped up by its surface-level beauty.

Is Eternights Worth It?

If You’re A Fan Of The Genre, Sure

Eternights can be purchased at a relatively low price of about $30. For that, you'll get yourself a game that's guaranteed to take about a dozen hours to complete, accompanied by a delightful soundtrack and voice acting that's well beyond what that price implies. Meanwhile, you'll also experience gameplay and writing that suits the cheap price tag. The ending just barely pushes it above good enough.

If you're a fan of these types of games, then Eternights is an overall worthwhile purchase. However, if you don't fit its target demographic, you might want to wait for a more substantial sale than its opening discount of 10%.

How Eternights Matches Up to Recently-Released Games

Games That Came Out Recently	How It Matches Up With Eternights
Sea of Stars	In many ways, Sea of Stars is a far better purchase than Eternights. The latter is completely trumped in many aspects, such as writing and combat. And while both do tie in with how well they fare with their audio overall, it's just a matter of individual facets being better in one game than the other. On the other hand, the main protagonist of Eternights is much better than Sea of Stars' two scarecrows. So unless you are deathly dismayed about the idea of playing a turn-based RPG or really like dating sims, Sea of Stars is definitely a better pick.
Thunder Ray	This is a tough pick, considering they're both wildly different games, only really connected by the fact that they provide action. However, Thunder Ray definitely wins out in terms of bang for your buck. It's an extremely enjoyable game you can play for short bursts or you can get into it with long grinds that aren’t burdened by an incomprehensible world. Although it could use a lot of work in the audio department, something Eternights excels in for the most part, it's still a game that delivers practically everything it promises.
SYNCED	Despite SYNCED being a free-to-play game, you'll technically still get more value from your hard-earned moolah by spending it on Eternights. The reason is simply because SYNCED is just an overall slightly above-average shooter that constantly tries to hook you into its microtransactions. You could find better free-to-play shooters, like Snowbreak: Containment Zone or Warframe, after a quick search on Google.

How Eternights Matches Up to Similar Games

Games Similar to Eternights	How It Matches Up With Eternights
Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel	There’s really no competition here. Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel is, in my disgustingly biased opinion, one of Falcom’s best works. And it seems like many players agree with those sentiments, as the game has gathered widely positive reviews from users and critics alike. Although it doesn’t really improve upon the genre much, it’s full of charming characters propped up by its gripping story and deep gameplay mechanics (and even deeper world-building). And while the romance aspect matters a lot in creating your own narrative, it is never shoved down your throat like in Eternights. The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel is a fantastic game made with much love and passion. Do get it. Even after almost a decade, this game can still captivate the hearts and imaginations of its audience.
Persona 5	As a so-called "Persona-inspired" game, it feels wrong to not compare Eternights to it. It certainly doesn't shy away from how the popular series inspired it, albeit in very shallow aspects. Group of teenagers out to save the world? Check. Problematic personal issues? Check. Otherworldly phenomenon central to the conflict? Yeah, you guessed it. And yes, there's dungeon crawling as well. However, it fails in many ways to match the same kind of charisma and style that the critically-acclaimed JRPG possesses. For example, most of the internal conflicts that each of your companions have in Eternights is only solved superficially. After all, the game has set it up so that there's no way for them to make peace with the targets of their regrets - because they're often dead. Ultimately, you're treated like a cute bandaid to cover their wounds. So, do yourself a favor and just get Persona.
Tokyo Xanadu	If you’re looking for a great game with many social elements and fast-paced dungeon crawling, look no further than another Nihon Falcom title, Tokyo Xanadu. The game overall feels like a mix between two of the developer’s major titles, Ys and The Legend of Heroes. And there we go; just from those words, anime game fans can already tell that Tokyo Xanadu is a game worth checking out. And it is. Tokyo Xanadu possesses a great balance between story and combat, made even prettier with its cast of wonderful characters and an enjoyable script. While it certainly isn’t as romance-heavy as Eternights, fans looking for a better time investment would be much happier with getting Tokyo Xanadu instead.

Eternights Trailer

Eternights Product Information

Title	ETERNIGHTS
Release Date	September 12, 2023
Developer	Studio Sai
Publisher	Studio Sai
Supported Platforms	PC, PS5, PS4
Genre	Action, RPG, Simulation
Number of Players	1
ESRB Rating	Mature
Official Website	Eternights Website

Alfonso Majarucon

Writer of things from game, anime and manga reviews to news and webnovels. Hopelessly addicted to story-driven games, especially cross-platform ones. Favorite games include Punishing Gray Raven, Arknights, Limbus Company, Elden Ring, Touhou, Soul Nomad and the Disgaea series (except 3 and 6). Avid..