It would be disingenuous to say that Eternity: The Last Unicorn is exactly what I expected it to be considering how many of its inspirations and design choices caught me off-guard within the first hour or so, but these unexpected additions nevertheless add up to the same basic picture; this is a game that carves out an undeniably unique experience despite some noteworthy issues that can make the moment-to-moment gameplay incredibly frustrating. The influence of Dark Souls will be immediately apparent given your constant reliance on your dodge’s invincibility frames, as well as the post-boss “so and so is dead” text. Less obvious is the incremental way you unlock new areas by obtaining new items reminiscent of the Metroid series (and to a certain extent, point-and-click adventure games). There’s a distinctly Japanese flair to the underlying design here, from level-up thresholds and fixed stat gains to an unforgiving difficulty curve that sometimes decides to crush you under its heel on a whim. And of course, there are the static and panning camera angles that are straight out of the Playstation 1 and 2 eras, taking control of the camera entirely out of your hands. Put simply, Eternity: The Last Unicorn lives up to its old-school aspirations, with all of the good and bad that entails.

Just about every feature in Eternity: The Last Unicorn comes with a litany of pros and cons that have to be considered.

Not being able to manually adjust the camera allows for some stunning camera sweeps as you move from area to area, but it can also make it difficult to tell how far away enemies are.

You’re sometimes given the opportunity to perform a quick finisher animation in combat that provides you with handy invincibility frames, but those frames don’t last long enough to dodge out of the way of an exploding enemy if they were defeated immediately before you began the animation (35:38).

Enemies dropping healing items is a welcome hint that grinding on the waves of enemies who replenish during area transitions is a viable strategy for overcoming sudden difficulty spikes, but the button for picking up items is the same as the one for finishers. The two are often confused during combat.

A lot of this can be worked around, of course, and the checkpoint system keeps death from being too much of a penalty while you figure things out, but Eternity: The Last Unicorn is a brutal game even without having to keep all of these things in mind; enemy attacks are rarely telegraphed well enough to differentiate tells from normal movement, it’s possible to get hit by attacks even when you’re behind enemies, and 1-4 attacks is usually all that it takes for playable characters Aurehen and Bior to go down. Taking damage doesn’t confer invincibility frames, either, which means that it’s possible to get hit with 2-3 attacks at once and drop dead before you know to react. I find the steep difficulty to be a breath of fresh air, personally, but my feelings on it become decidedly less positive when several dodges in a row result in my character becoming frozen and unable to move until they dodge again. Difficulty is great, but the mechanics and bugs need a little tweaking to ensure that it’s a fair difficulty.

Still, Eternity: The Last Unicorn has an undercurrent of charm that defies explanation. Its early pacing is brisk to the point where characters seem downright rude (love it), and that constant sense of progress makes it easy to justify pushing forward despite the occasional 3-hit mob insta-death. Whether that delicate balance between charm and awkwardness will continue to skew in Eternity: The Last Unicorn‘s favor as I fight deeper into it remains to be seen, but my first 3 or so hours with it have proven to be weirdly enjoyable, if intermittently infuriating. So many deaths.

Eternity: The Last Unicorn is available now on Steam and Playstation 4, and will also launch on Xbox One at some point in the future.

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