How weird is too weird? Apparently, that question never crossed the mind of any on the development team at ACE Team, as the studio and publisher Good Shepherd Entertainment formally announced their latest venture: the open-world survival adventure game The Eternal Cylinder.
Now, you may be thinking that an open-world adventure game holds no surprises at all in 2019, and that there’s nothing that can be that absurd when it comes to the whole genre. You’d honestly be wrong about that though, as The Eternal Cylinder looks like a drug-induced fever dream in the middle of sweltering desert heat; weirdly and strangely enough though, it works very much in its favor. Check out the announcement trailer for The Eternal Cylinder below.
At first glance, The Eternal Cylinder just looks like Spore remade with a somewhat terrifying hyper-realistic art design. A few seconds later, and the plot lost me at that giant brass cylinder rolling and crushing everything in its path. The Eternal Cylinder looks like it was made to baffle and intrigue, and in that regards, it does a very good job. The trailer also showed some neat evolution to the creatures featured, as well as some multiplayer gameplay elements.
Thankfully, not all of the plot is lost in the trailer, as Good Shepherd provided some insights into The Eternal Cylinder via an overview. The game will see you control a herd of “adorable” (to each his own, I guess) creatures called Trebhums as they explore a strange alien world filled with various exotic lifeforms and strange environments. This world is also under the constant threat of the Cylinder, a rolling superstructure that crushes everything in its path, like a gigantic rolling pin running over a cutting board. The landscapes are also procedurally-generated, and feature unique animal AI and real-time world destruction. At the start, your Trebhums are at the bottom of the literal food chain. However, just like in Spore, they can evolve and adapt a ton of mutations in order to face harder challenges that lie ahead.
The Eternal Cylinder will be released on consoles and for PC exclusively via the Epic Games Store in 2020.
