Shadow of the Eternals: Concerns

With Eternal Darkness on my mind again, I decided to check up on its theoretically-still-coming spiritual successor; Shadow of the Eternals. And... checking out its trailer... does not fill me with confidence, even aside how its two Kickstarters failed to secure the intended funding.

I mean, for starters they labeled the trailer a 'gameplay trailer', and there's no gameplay in it. There is an engine for a game that is running, but it's just showing us graphics, voice acting, and some cinematics to boot. There's not even some rudimentary puzzle-solving. This is concerning in and of itself, but especially if you combine it with some of the sentiments the people behind it have expressed -that eg games have historically leaned away from storytelling because the gaming industry was 'immature', rather than because games are games- and the company website's front page talking about games, movies, and TV 'converging'... Eternal Darkness already had some issues from its gameplay having interesting ideas that got short shrift because the game was more focused on its storytelling. If Shadow of the Eternals goes even further in that direction -assuming it ever manages to get released at all- I'll be left to wonder why anyone bothered to make a video game at all, rather than a CGI show that gets to put all its effort into the story and art and so on.

Also concerning is how the trailer is primarily 'Anthony's sequence in Eternal Darkness with the serial numbers filed off'. The church we see not-Anthony standing within is nearly identical to the church Anthony explores in Eternal Darkness. There's a not-Tome-of-Eternal-Darkness that people can use to flashback to other people's history, and it even has the same art stuff of the frames of pictures tending to be images of skeletons and whatnot, in the same style as the Tome in Eternal Darkness. Not-Anthony is a messenger here to see Charlemagne, just like Anthony. A priest or monk has been killed, and it's pretty clear that something about the death is unusual in the same way that Anthony discovers his dead priest/monk had a Bonethief tear its way out of his chest. There's even some descriptions that are nearly identical to ones from Eternal Darkness -while it's Paul rather than Anthony who ends up disquieted by seeing a church lacking sacred tools where they belong, otherwise that bit is lifted nearly word-for-word and shot-for-shot from Eternal Darkness.

It's possible that this is not representative of the intentions with the game as a whole. It could be that the trailer is meant to convey the Eternal Darkness-ness of the game first and foremost, with the later portion of the trailer being more different being more representative of the plans; the creatures not-Anthony spots don't really correlate to anything from Eternal Darkness, and the vision not-Anthony suffers through is quite different from any Sanity effects from Eternal Darkness in a number of ways that could be potentially quite interesting.

But the overall picture painted puts me in mind overly much of an HD remake with the serial numbers filed off, rather than a spiritual successor. I'm half-expecting, if the game ever goes anywhere, for there to be a not-Pious lich character, an American family with a mansion and sordid history, and so on, and precious little new ground being tread.

It's too bad, because I'd like to see a sequel or spiritual successor to Eternal Darkness, but more because Eternal Darkness has the foundations for a lot of interesting possibilities that the game itself doesn't properly explore, not because I want an HD remake for the modern era.

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