Eldritch Review

Actually, the amorphous cloud of bitcode manipulating the AI is really quite competent – in the sense that their behaviour is consistent and logical within the bounds of their simple range of actions – but they're so slow on the uptake and easy to evade that they're scarcely able to perceive you as a threat. On the occasion that they do before you've diced them to pieces, the most they can do is try to chase you down and give you a good slap (essentially impossible, since you can outrun anything that doesn't make use of gas-turbine engines) or fling fireballs with all the gusto of a pensioner with a paper plane. Even the indestructible Shoggoths or the Weeping-Angel-esque stone lizard men are mere annoyances to be granted a moment's care and then forgotten about. These are supposed to be horrific abominations from beyond the veil of madness, not harmless waddling toys to be disregarded as you freely speed on by. It felt like I was in a Looney Tunes cartoon at times, instantly flummoxing my pursuers by running around a corner or dashing into a room and hiding behind the one piece of solid terrain within it. None of this is helped by the fact that your foes are incapable of using ladders or jumping up and down perfectly safe ledges. Who would've thought that one of the side effects of joining an ancient cult was acute vertigo?

Perhaps that's being overly critical. After all, Eldritch does concede an unlockable hard mode upon finishing the game – they call it NG+, but you can use it from the start of a playthrough so the whole point of designating it as NG+ goes down the toilet – and while it feels like a slipshod solution at times, it does indeed prop up the difficulty curve considerably. It's fairly apparent that all the mode does is fiddle with some sliders somewhere in the code – health, damage, reaction time, spawn rates of enemies and items – but it works out positively in the end. You can still get into minor scrapes and carve up isolated lesser enemies like slimy otherworldly turkeys, but diving head-first into a room full of unaware horrors is much more likely to leave you as food for the fish-men, and it's considerably harder to acquire the necessary equipment to even attempt that in the first place. Consequentially, hiding and running away rapidly becomes the strategy du jour for dealing with foes, which – as a devoted fan of the Thief series – I personally warmed to extremely quickly.

So why, if this mode's impact on the game's experience is entirely positive, are you forced to go through the menial task of proving yourself worthy of it? The game is not extensive nor hostile enough for its completion to be considered a challenge, and even if it was, elevating a difficulty mode into the realm of unlockable content is an insidious decision at best. This is a dreadful example of artificial game lengthening, holding what ought to be an essential feature just out of reach until you've gone through the whole thing at least once. Being forced to complete the game before it actually gets its claws out also means that you've already seen essentially everything, so there's hardly any incentive to play the harder difficulty mode beyond sheer masochism.

While we're in the general neighbourhood of harmlessness, why the cutesy Lovecraftian aesthetic? I won't rag on this more than necessary – mostly because whiny demands for next-gen graphics on every single thing that passes under our noses is exactly the wrong message for the gaming community to send to developers – but the novelty of de-clawing famous icons of horror into something fuzzy and appealing is something that legions of Deviantart users have long since worn away until only a stump remains where originality once stood. It's not all that bothersome but it feels like the game skipped out on the chance to create some real tension, especially when the sound design surprisingly excels at putting you on edge. Between distorted, dissonant background hums, the occasional eerie off-key guitar strum and the unearthly grunts and wails of distant foes, Eldritch manages to create quite an effective atmosphere of lonely oppression in an unfamiliar place. What a shame it is, then, that everything evaporates the moment you realise that the most effective strategy for dealing with Cthulhu's little cousin is to rush forward and empty your six-shooter into his tentacle-ridden face.

Occasionally, through fault of your own or simple misfortune, you will die, and this is where the game's most perplexing feature comes into play: permanent death. I feel that this was something thrown in as part of the game's pretensions to being a roguelike, but sadly misses the point somewhat. Perma-death isn't merely a way of universally raising the stakes, because in order for it to feel threatening it first has to have something to threaten the player with. In a traditional roguelike with heavy RPG elements this made sense, since your character was something that became more valuable over time thanks to the accumulation of better weapons, armour, loot and spells, not to mention their progression through the extremely lengthy game world. Knowing that one bad move could throw all that effort down the drain was what created the tension in such games. Eldritch, by contrast, has such elements toned down so heavily that dying doesn't feel like much of a consequence. You can obtain spells and upgrades, yes, but only one spell and one of each type of upgrade, so there's very little character progression to be protective over.

I've been rather unkind to Eldritch throughout this review, but that's largely because it disappointed me. It's Spelunky without the teeth; an insubstantial little window into a world of potential without the length or depth to really fill the shoes it picked out for itself. Call it ambitious, call it a high-budget idea for a low-budget game, but while it might fall short of its glorious vision it still lands a furlong or so ahead of whatever yard-stick marks the point of average. It's an indie game too, so it's cheap as chips if you're into the whole value for money thing. Blast through it in an hour or so, pick up the NG+ mode and play it in the quiet moments between other games.

Oh yes, and if you find the secret level, please let me know. I'm still looking for the wretched thing.