Review anarchistica 2/5 · Jun 4, 2026
Not everything has to be gamified
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Playtime: 2 hours (2 days before hack)
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Played: 2026
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Context: I often like talking to people in games.
Intro
Eternights consists of two parts. One part is interacting with your party members, which eventually gives various bonuses and can lead to romance. Most of this involves minigames.
The other part is combat. Combat is fairly basic 3D hack-n'-slash with quicktimer …
-
Playtime: 2 hours (2 days before hack)
-
Played: 2026
-
Context: I often like talking to people in games.
Intro
Eternights consists of two parts. One part is interacting with your party members, which eventually gives various bonuses and can lead to romance. Most of this involves minigames.
The other part is combat. Combat is fairly basic 3D hack-n'-slash with quicktimer events. Your options are strike and dodge. You also unlock heavy strike, a cooldown ability and a buildup ability (strike/dodge to fill bar). Your party can support you with spells.
First attempt
I kind of liked Eternights. The dialogue was pretty amusing at times, it is weird and it's also surprisingly brutal. Despite that, i almost quit. My controller didn't work and dodge was bound to Spacebar. You constantly have to dodge, it's the second most important button. And you have less than a second to dodge. You can't rebind keys and it made combat overly hard. I was going to drop the game with a 3 star review. But for some reason my controller worked the third time i plugged it in, so i played some more. And that actually made it worse.
Annoyances
Eternights already had some annoying elements before you reach the part where you are free to act in the train (1,5 hours in). Dodge timing seems off and the buildup move that strips barriers from bosses has multiple quicktimer events. There are also no autosaves and the menu controls are awful. Worst of all is the lack of text speed and auto-progress, so you're constantly hitting A on controller, left-mouse or... Enter? That is what Space is for!
Training
In the train it gets worse. You get two actions per day. During daytime you can talk or train. At night you can scavenge or talk. Training involves an annoying minigame. If you do well you get 5 NPC XP, average gives 3XP, poor nothing. Scavenging is even worse. You have to pick from 3 areas and have 1 minute to find a specific item in that area that has about a dozen containers. If you pick the wrong area or are too slow you get nothing at all.
You only have 8-10 (?) actions before you have to leave the train, so doing poorly feels bad and it also makes the game harder in the long run. After scavenging you get a scene followed by a dream, both requiring lots of tapping to speed up and go to the next line. And only when you wake up can you reload and try scavenging again.
Conclusion
Not every part of your game has to have gameplay. The minigames and quicktimer events already got on my nerves just 2 hours in. Having to constantly constantly click to speed up/progress lines of dialogue, which also caused me to miss some, made it worse. Having to choose between not being able to dodge and having to use a controller (which is really don't like) in combat is strike three.
