Eternum EX

I have a soft spot for the kind of game that could have shipped on a floppy disk in 1987 and nobody would have blinked. Eternum EX is exactly that: a hand-crafted love letter to a very specific corner of arcade history, built by a solo Spanish developer who grew up feeding coins into cabinets and never quite got over it. That origin story matters, because the game's entire design language flows from it rather than being retrofitted for nostalgia points. The loop is old-school simple and deliberately so. Each of the 25 stages tasks Sir Arthur, a geriatric knight hunting for magical orbs of eternal youth, with collecting every treasure chest on screen before a portal opens to the next level. Horizontal stages alternate with vertical tower climbs, those tall, thin gauntlets where a boss waits at the summit like a grim bouncer. One hit kills you. Lives are finite in Home Console mode (three continues, world-based saves), and infinite but progress-wiping in Arcade mode. The chest-hunting core is lifted directly from Baluba-louk no Densetsu, seasoned with the map aesthetic of Ghosts 'n Goblins and the kinetic energy of Bomb Jack. The developer name-drops all four inspirations on the game's own homepage and never tries to hide the lineage, which I respect enormously. Radin built something honest. What works is the feel of each world having its own soundtrack cue and visual palette, the way chests can be bumped from below to inflate their value (at the cost of precious timer seconds), and the pre-placed lightning orbs that temporarily convert Arthur's walking-cane swipe into a fireball. That single offensive power-up is the closest the game gets to tactical depth, and it creates genuine small decisions: grab the orb now before entering the boss room, or save it? The pixel art sits somewhere between the 8-bit and 16-bit generations, sprite animations are charming, and Arthur himself has a wonderful rickety energy when he leaps and swings. The per-world boss encounters, a feature absent from the original free Eternum release, give the tower climbs a proper punctuation mark. The friction, and it is real friction, comes from input timing. Some reviewers and players have flagged a slight delay between pressing jump or attack and the action landing, which in a one-hit-kill arcade game is the difference between a clean run and a death that feels stolen rather than earned. It is not universally crippling but it is there, and you should know going in that the game's difficulty is partly from enemy placement and partly from learning to fire your inputs slightly earlier than instinct suggests. The level design also grows repetitive across the horizontal stages; the visual themes shift between worlds but the underlying structure stays the same, and by world three the chest-hunt formula loses some freshness. At roughly 90 minutes to complete, the game ends before the repetition becomes a serious grievance, which is exactly the right call. This is arcade design: short, sharp, meant to be replayed for score. Eternum EX is a modest game that knows precisely what it is. It will not convert anyone who has never found joy in old cabinet games, and it does not try to. For players who already feel the pull of that era, though, there is something genuinely heartening about a one-person indie project that treats Bomb Jack and Psychic 5 as worthy ancestors rather than ironic references. The craftsmanship is real, the ambition is appropriately scaled, and the 25 stages go down fast enough that the rougher edges never fully derail the experience.

Kai · Scout Team

Indie & narrative

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