The story is deep and revolves around slavery, liberation, and saving the world, so as far as that goes it’s pretty stereotypical. This isn’t to say that’s a bad thing though. The story will keep you involved for pretty much the whole game, and sticks to a very tried and true formula. There is not much else to say about it honestly, and if there is any part of the game that is lacking, it’s the story, but it won’t at all interfere with your gaming enjoyment. It does toss you for a loop at the end, but its up to you to find out what that loop is.

The combat and gameplay system is a little sluggish at first. The controls are a bit non-responsive, but the timing can be gotten down easily. Over the course of the game you gain new abilities, including back flips, double jumps, and other forms of movement. Until you have a good portion of them the combat can be a bit repetitive and tedious. Luckily afterward the combat starts to pick up, and become very interactive.

The game successfully recreates the Metroid or Castlevania: Symphony of the Night gameplay feel, with a large open area left for the player to explore. The player is left to find their own path, repeatedly backtracking to use their new abilities to reach new areas. The story evolves as you meet new characters, and vanquish new foes, many of which you could not deal with without one key ability you picked up along the way. Unfortunately, the difficulty of Eternal Daughter does get a bit much at times. You will die over, and over, and over again, and yet the boss fights and stages will be enjoyable enough to try it one more time. Oh, and use a controller… you’ll be completely lost if you try to play with a keyboard.

The graphics are crisp and smooth moving, recreating the old spritey feel of the Super Nintendo. The backgrounds are tiled and can get a bit repetitive, but the foregrounds are beautiful and very well drawn. If anything, the super deformed characters do get awkward at times, however, this is subtle and barely noticeable. If you have a newer system though, beware, as Eternal Daughter sometimes encounters a graphics problem producing several afterimages that make the game unplayable.

The music in Eternal Daughter is very well composed, and completely original. Done completely in MIDI, the score, done by David Saulesco, really sets the mood well, with steampunkish, and medieval tunes fleshing out the atmosphere. The sound-quality is quite superior considering it is done in MIDI and although it does not completely get around the tinny sound that comes with the format, it does have a very polished and professional feel.

Overall, for a free game, Eternal Daughter feels almost as if it could have come out on a console. As such I believe just about everyone should download it and give it a go at least once. It will keep you occupied for several hours, and probably provide for at least one replay, more than enough to warrant the minimal hard drive space used for the install.

Requirements:
N/A
Tested on:
AMD Athlon 64 2.2 GHz, 2x512 MB RAM, Geforce 4 64 MB, Windows XP.