Eternity's Child: The Wrong Platform

Yesterday Kieron linked to the rather unfortunate debacle that took place on Destructoid, as indie developer Luc Bernard had a bit of a drunken explosion in response to their negative reviews of Eternity's Child. So I thought I'd take a look.

Bernard's constant refrain within his posts was other reviews would be coming, and they would prove that D-toid's 1/10 mark was wildly wrong. Well, this won't change anything. Eternity's Child is a pretty awful platform game.

There's no reason to kick it further here - the reviews on Destructoid are accurate, and friendly in their disappointment. This is one man's passion, and it's a great shame it hasn't worked out. (I should add, I feel the same about any of the eighty billion games a year I get given to review that score 50% or lower - my job is to be detached and descriptive about a game's successes or failings, but it doesn't mean that awful nagging about people's hard work being kicked in the face isn't present. I just ignore it because I'm callous and foul).

Bernard has to realise something, however. The moment you put a price on your game, you lose the right to be the wounded deer. I forked out (an admittedly very small amount of) my money to play this, and I certainly do not feel it was a good use of it. It's horrible to know that somebody put their heart and soul into something, and then it didn't work out. (And that's the thing - it didn't work out. It's not critical failings in the reviewers, it's an unsuccessful game.) But as soon as you ask for money in return, you're now a business and you've got to suck it up.

I should add that the claims that the patch fixes the jumping issues aren't accurate. They may be a lot better than originally, but I got pretty damned fed up with one level as the jump kept ignoring me and I fell to my death, over and over. Then Avast declared that the map editor (that I wasn't running) was a virus, and the whole thing came to a staggering end. And that was quite enough.