Eternal Evil Review

Eternal Evil is set in a small town that was ravaged by an apocalypse event that turns its citizens into bloodthirsty zombies. It’s up to Hank and Markus to get to the bottom of everything and understand what happened and find a way to stop in order to save their city and its residents.

Eternal Evil is a first person horror title. You’ll explore various areas such as a giant mansion, forest and a city in order to complete your objectives. When starting up the game, you have the choice to start with the character of your choice; akin to Resident Evil 2. In order to survive, you’ll find a handful of weapons, items to replenish your health. And lots of complex puzzles that will rack your brain.

The game brings back old school survival horror difficulty with scarce ammo and bullet sponges enemies. The game also has a few boss fights peppered through the game; monstrosities reminiscent of Capcom’s juggernaut franchise. However, they are quite unbalanced. Some of them, you can simply move from left to right and dodge projectiles by shooting; whereas others the boss will stick to you like glue and dish out a lot of damage.

Thankfully, as either protagonist, you have a few things to help on this quest. Along with your trusty knife, you’ll find a decent select of firearms such as a shotgun or machinegun. Those who take the time to explore every nook and cranny will also come across items to upgrade their weapons. If your health gets low, you’ll find water bottles and chocolate bars to replenish your health.

If you find the default difficulty challenging, you can set set a selection of settings that will allow you a simpler gaming experience by providing you a machinegun with unlimited ammo and also you’ll be able to come across silver skulls. Silver Skulls can be used to skip puzzles and they are limited in quantity. The only addendum? You need to do the first half i.e. gather all necessary items. Whcih is odd because if you use a skull to skip a puzzle, the items remains in your inventory.

Keen players will recognize the safe room principle from RE games. You’ll find certain rooms where you’ll be able to save by writing into a book and find a magical box where you can store items.In order to alleviate the constant back tracking, some boxes are placed near puzzles and other places where brain scratching is required. And please for the love of god, save often. The game doesn’t have checkpoints/auto saves. If you die, you’re back at the last time you saved.

The game looks good as a whole; the environments are dark, moody and unsettling at times. The solo developer managed to capture orginial Resident Evil games’ atmosphere; whether it be inside a dark mansion or outside in a forest. However, the game can be incredibly glitchy. Textures and colors popping in and out, if you walk over or next to the wrong thing, you can be glitched inside the environment forcing you to reload the last save. The story is told through comic book scenes. On the audio side, for the most part, it’s quite well done with a very minimalistic approach. The only odd thing is that the walking soundbytes aren’t always in sync with your character’s footsteps. So much so that when you’ll stop walking, you’ll hear an additional footstep or two; can easily make you think there are enemies around. Voiceover work is fine; nothing really special, but nothing real cringe-y.

The game’s first annoying quirk is the running. Yes the character runs at decent speed, but the camera bops around left, right, up and down that it’s borderline nauseating. While yes you can simply walk around and soak in the atmosphere and creepyness, you’ll be prompted to run at times from certain enemies. The running perspective can also make it harder to see where you’re going. Yet AAA studios can make a decent running perspective, but this seems to elude indie developers. The game can be quite brutal out of the game; I hope your headshot skills are on point.

Eternal Evil is the more Resident Evil than Resident Evil has Resident Evil-ed since the first game in 1996 (or its 2022 remake). Puzzle heavy, scarce resources, limited guidances and monstrosities as boss battles. It’s challenging, creepy and unnerving. However, it is plagued with glitches and enemies are hard as nails that more often than not require headshots. That being said, it’s impressive what a single developer can do. If you can overlook its issues and clunkyness, you’ll find one of the better survival horror games available. There’s something special here and if a sequel can be made by ironing out the quirks, it could be a great franchise. Highly recommended to survival horror games but just remember these two things: aim for the head and save often.