The Eternal Life Of Goldman is a gorgeous, nightmare throwback to classic 16-bit platformers
From the devs behind This Is The Police
THQ Nordic have announced The Eternal Life Of Goldman, a hand-drawn platformer from This Is The Police and Hollywood Animal devs Weappy. I caught a brief presentation earlier in the week and yeah, this seems promising. On the one hand, it reminds me of cheery 16-bit hop 'n' boppers like, say, the Mega Drive adaptation of Disney's Aladdin. On the other, it makes me think of side-scrolling Soulslikes (Scroulslikes?) such as Blasphemous and the frantic worldbuilding of Rick & Morty.
The Eternal Life Of Goldman takes place in a sickly colonial fantasy world, made up of layer upon layer of beautiful/awful animated backdrop and foreground, all of it painstakingly drawn frame by frame (the devs have explicitly ruled out using generative AI). The setting and menagerie borrow from ancient Greek, Jewish and Mesopotamian folklore, while the narrative is sort of one big meditation on mortality, which certainly takes many forms in the game.
You play the Goldman of the title, a tenacious old adventurer with a cane. The cane can be upgraded with Metroid-esque gadgets such as a laser pointer, and Goldman has some kind of AOE singing ability that reminds me of chanting in Abe's Odyssey. It's a precision platformer, though less fiddly than the likes of Super Meat Boy, and Weappy hope to reward exploration of the world without relying on backtracking.
There's a sense of winning nastiness to the moving parts. For example, there are screeching apes in cages you can drag around to serve as platforms. There are possibly-organic, grinning balloons you can latch onto during platforming sequences, yanking their faces downward into a frown. The balloons remind me of Mega Drive Aladdin's Cave Of Wonders, where you'd climb and scamper over bits of free-floating Genie anatomy. There are also accordion structures of wood and cloth that can be pulled out to create routes. This last flourish isn't all that nasty, on paper - it ought to be charming, a piece of whimsical stagecraft. But it feels somewhat grisly in the context of so much brutality, like you're tugging on a flap of skin.
From the looks of the trailer, the further you go, the more openly dreadful the landscape becomes. There are steampunk cities with clanking robot enforcers, and a boss that consists of a three-headed, screaming gargoyle woman with serrated fangs and a lungful of fireballs. Speaking as a critic who is obstinately prone to detecting horror themes in the cosiest of games, I am enthused. There's no release date yet, but you can learn more about The Eternal Life Of Goldman on Steam.