Aeterna Noctis (Switch) review

Looking for an adventure with challenging platforming and demanding combat? Aeterna Noctis offers both, but adversity is accompanied by a bit too much aggravation.

At first glance, Aeterna Noctis seems like another indistinctive Metroidvania.  You play as the King of Darkness, condemned to compete for control of the world against the Queen of Light. The rivalry has been continuing for eons, creating a semblance of balance. But the game’s anime-style opening cinematic depicts the Queen triumphant in battle, with the victory sending the King plunging like a meteorite toward the world below, stripped of almost all of his potent abilities.

Like many entries in the genre, Aeterna Noctis’ journey revolves around a gradual re-possession of your powers. You’ll start meagerly, with a modest leap and a feeble melee attack. Both are essential since your journey through Aeterna is filled with roving creatures like slimes and blade-carrying specters who will pursue you mercilessly. The typical tools of the trade, such as additional weapons as well as a sprawling tech grid filled with navigational and offensive capabilities, are all predictably present.

Unforgiving Platforming…

Soon you’ll discover Aeterna’s distinctive trait: exploration reveals a wealth of precarious platforming. One of the first aptitudes you’ll have to master is a secondary, smaller leap by bouncing off a floating object.  This is triggered by a precisely timed downward weapon thrust, catapulting you back upward. But the maneuver never quite feels as refined as it should be. After several falls, the King will respawn at one of the game’s numerous checkpoints. But these feel like concessions for sporadic lapses of precision.

But it’s not just the occasional clumsiness of the game’s controls that will wear you down. Unlike most Metroidvanias that provide intermittent tests of platforming prowess, Aeterna Noctis will challenge you persistently. Often positioning stretches of small platforms above spikes and other hazards, just navigating through the game’s sixteen biomes can feel laborious. Typically, the genre doesn’t require players to master techniques like air cancels or scampering across extended walkways that phase in and out. But here, you’ll encounter the type of elevated navigational challenges found in titles like Super Meat Boy or Celeste. While you’ll earn upgrades like a teleportation arrow, new forms of adversity accompany each new ability. It’s relentless, and that’s the point.

For masochists, the developers dangle dividends like heart pieces that can extend your life gauge. But you’ll have to toil for every single bonus. While that’s customary for the genre, getting these bonuses in Aeterna can easily double the game’s twenty-hour playtime. For most players, those extra hours might feel torturous.

…And Demanding Combat

Similarly, enemy encounters are no pushovers. Sure, you’ll find the usual pacifistic foes at first. But soon, the game’s adversaries pursue you doggedly as soon as they spot you. Confronting them like some kind of Castlevania fodder would be foolish, given their speed and navigational methods. Instead, you’ll want to read their patterns, intrepidly striking at the intermittent opportunities between their attacks. Occasionally, Aeterna Noctis punishes with one-hit kills, so you’ll want to advance cautiously until you’ve gleaned enemy weaknesses.

When the environment and enemies inevitably deplete your health, you’ll forfeit all of your collected money, experience, and potions. Your place of death is marked with a symbol, and if you’re able to venture back to the location without dying a second time, you’ll regain lost belongings. That’s not the only Souls-like quality to be found. Thrones function like bonfires, offering a place to upgrade your abilities or fast travel throughout the world.

A Trite Tech Tree

While protagonist builds aren’t completely customizable, Aeterna does provide you with options. Enemy drops tend to bounce and fall to the floors below, so a bit of magnetism can eliminate the waste. Other options include the customary intensification of attack power or a better chance of landing a critical strike. You’ll probably wish the game’s tech grid wasn’t so generic, though. Often, your capacities feel culled from an early-millennium MMO.

Likewise, the game’s aesthetics are competent, but not exactly innovative. The game’s zones exhibit distinction but too often enemy types are recycled. Additionally, the game’s texturing can be a bit bland, with stages and opponents rendered with broad brushes which becomes more evident when playing in docked mode. Aeterna does try to hide its graphical economy with a healthy amount of parallax scrolling and visual effects, but occasionally the screen can get a bit too busy. Although the game’s soundtrack occasionally veers into unexpected territories, individual tracks are rather short, resulting in repetition.

Aeterna Noctis’ Switch port exhibits a few problems that weren’t in previous releases. Load times between areas are between 5-8 seconds long, but the fundamental issue is the frequency of these pauses. These tend to disrupt the momentum of the game’s action. But the biggest issue is the erraticism of the framerate. Precision platforms require steady refresh rates but sporadically the game’s performance will impede your progress. This can be exasperating.

At times, you’ll feel overwhelmed by Aeterna Noctis’ difficulty. Some of that is intentional; it’s satisfying to overcome a seemingly insurmountable challenge. But too often, the game is either tedious or infuriating, rewarding players with new abilities that don’t seem worth the effort.

Aeterna Noctis was played on Switch with review code provided by the publisher