Eternity: The Last Unicorn

Soulsborne is a genre that was created by developer FromSoftware, they essentially created this terrifying game to play, which is so daunting to get through that the rewarding feeling of accomplishment the players feel after they are done with them makes up for every bit of suffering you have gone through during your play-time.

Some of the games in this genre aren’t as punishing as Dark Souls, Star Wars: Jedi Fallen Order for example is a similar game in triple AAA form which has a lot of checkpoints and not a huge penalty for death. Eternity: The Last Unicorn is a game that dwindles between the lines of being punishing yet rewarding and also trying to appeal to a mass audience of casual players that aren’t big on the soulsborne genre.

Missing an Identity

One of Eternity the Last Unicorn’s biggest problems is it not having a particular sense of what it wants to be, it tries to imitate the Soulsborne genre by having difficult and slow sluggish combat that heavily relies on a rolling away mechanic, yet the rolling makes your character invincible throughout the animation so it doesn’t have that huge of a penalty if you mess up. It also has a very weird dynamic between the player character and the camera, where the camera is often times static which makes spotting enemies and targeting hits much more difficult.

You save at bonfires like the abovementioned FromSoftware games, and there are random boss encounters lain throughout the game albeit not as engaging because of the annoying static camera mechanics. The game also has a punishing difficulty in its combat, the checkpoints being more frequent makes this a bit less frustrating but the terrible camera placement in the game and the punishing difficulty do not go well.

Forced Backwards

Eternity: The Last Unicorn’s is a bit confused; the game’s core gameplay loop is horribly frustrating because of this design. The game demands you to craft items, but it doesn’t let you know what items you require until you get to said area of the level, then you have to backtrack through the entire level and collect the items required for you to craft, then you have to go back to the crafting area and craft the item and THEN, it lets you move on forward. This is essentially the entirety of the game’s gameplay loop. The backtracking is made even more tedious by constant enemy respawns in the same locations that you have already cleared them through.

The bosses in the game are also some of the most annoying affairs. Bosses possess the ability to one-hit kill you and the camera’s static nature makes it highly difficult to understand their patterns or what they are going to do. The story is definitely not very fun either. It’s a generic “chosen one saves the world” kind of ordeal. You play as two characters, Aurehen a young female elf warrior hell bent on saving the last unicorn to save the elven immortality, and Bior a Viking who is not really important whatsoever except he saves Aurehen like once.

A Lot Is Missing

Even though Eternity the Last Unicorn is a game with a fun to look at art style and punishing gameplay that might appeal to the fans of the Soulsborne genre, it falls flat on its face because of some poor design choices such as the static camera placement, an upgrade and ability system that is lacking in depth and a combat that is punishing but not so rewarding by the end of it.

Pros

• Fun to look at art style
• Punishing gameplay for fans of the genre
• Many check points making for a more lenient experience than others in the genre

Cons

• The static camera is a spawn of Satan
• Graphically not too great
• Slow and sluggish controls
• Frustratingly unfair boss fights
• Forgettable soundtrack and boring sound design