For this critical play, I tried out the game Eternal Afternoon. The game was developed by Alex Klebler, and was released on Steam in March of this year. Eternal Afternoon targets a more mature audience; players who are interested in games that tackle themes of mortality and the human condition. The game also appeals heavily to the nostalgia of older players, invoking youthful memories of wandering throughout a neighborhood and even utilizing a retro art style reminiscent of games of the time.
In Eternal Afternoon, you play as Sasha, an ordinary 10-year-old boy spending his last twenty minutes in the world before the Black Wave – an unstoppable, eldritch force – wipes away the world. The central mechanic is a time loop; each run lasts for 20 real-time minutes, but you can replay this loop over and over to discover everything the world has to offer.
Overall, I found this to be a game designed with immense emotional richness. Distinctly designed characters provide quests, making walking necessary to both experience the story and make progress. Eternal Afternoon also masterfully uses game mechanics like fall damage to create embedded narratives. However, I did find the game to be too goal-oriented, with walking slowly beginning to feel like a means to an end rather than a means of exploration.
Right from the beginning, this game carries a sense of heavy nostalgia. This is because the entire world of this game is designed to be an evocative space; specifically, evocative of a suburban neighborhood from the player’s youth. The neighborhood’s appearance (which appears to be based on Klexber’s own) is not universal to every player, but the common childhood experiences that come from walking around in it are; your best friend waiting outside your door to hang out, scuffles with older bullies at the park, and childhood crushes.
By having the environment evoke universal childhood experiences and emotion, not just imagery, the player can project their own memories onto the events of the game, making it emotionally resonant for an audience from a far wider variety of backgrounds.
Talking to characters opens up the bulk of this game: missions. Many of the characters have micronarratives where you must help with some final request before the end of the world. Having these missions be triggered by walking and talking is another incentive for the player to explore thoroughly. Missions in this game form a complex network, with some quests requiring the rewards from a handful of others in order to complete.
The first two or so 20-minute cycles in this game will likely be spent in free-form exploration, simply opening up all these loose ends and familiarizing yourself with the world and characters. However, I found that around the third cycle, when I had talked to everyone and explored the neighborhood thoroughly, I became far more mission-oriented than exploration oriented. The result of this is walking becoming a means to an end, rather than the primary method of enjoying the game.
For instance, I set a goal on my third run that I would focus my efforts on completing the Noa kiss mission. This mission requires a gold milk cap, which in turn requires you to find 5 grasshopper varieties for Shlomi. Thus, the remaining three runs I did were spent aimlessly running around trying to find the elusive violet grasshopper, completely ignoring the emotionally rich environment as I ran from place to place.
This is made somewhat more frustrating with the time loop mechanic. Though you learn a bit more each run, you don’t retain any items you collect, which goes as far as making walking feel like a chore and obstacle to your goals, rather than your goal itself.
A great fix to this is what a similar game, The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask does: the Bomber’s Notebook. The Bomber’s Notebook is an automatically updating log of every character and the components of their mission, which ensures that the character wastes no time trying to remember what mission is needed for what. Eternal Afternoon has no such mechanic, meaning my immersion was regularly broken by needing to take manual notes to keep track of everything I was learning.
The neighborhood is full of environmental storytelling, but interestingly, I found the most interesting instance of embedded narrative to be fall damage. The world is intentionally grounded in reality. The setting is an ordinary neighborhood with ordinary people, you have no extraordinary abilities. However, your character does not take any fall damage. He even comments on it, stating that he finds his lack of injuries strange.
The game uses its environment to ensure the player knows this is abnormal. The player is likely drawn to the water tower, since one of the first characters you interact with, your friend Ron, takes refuge there. A splattered corpse lies on the pavement at the base of the tower, implying suicide by jumping from it. Inside the tower, mattresses also exist underneath the stairway to break your fall. All this tells the player that people of this world are not immune to gravity, and the subversion of expectations upon realizing that you are immune to harm enforces that there is something very wrong with this world, that the Black Wave is somehow influencing reality.
This slight diversion from reality is enough to spark a sense of mystery for the player. There is now a broader goal for the player beyond the micronarratives of the missions: to understand the secret of this world, and potentially use that knowledge to stop the Wave. The enacted narrative of the individual missions are also strengthened by having a broader narrative, since even if the player does not discover or complete every single one, they can still solve the larger mystery of the game. This gives the player more freedom to pursue the stories they are interested in, rather than locking them into a completionist playstyle.
The absence of violence is particularly interesting in this game, because it directly translates to the game’s atmosphere. The environment shows that violence has occurred, with crashed cars and occasional dead bodies, but you as a player are not able to invoke violence, and other characters will not either. It tells an interesting story of human nature: in the last moments before death, the evil and materialistic qualities of humanity are stripped away.
Violence is the primary way that a player can manipulate the world in video games. Killing is an incredibly powerful way to interact with a world. But in a game like this, where the point is to coexist with characters, it forces the player to use words and kindness to manipulate the world instead.
