40 The Eternal Cylinder PC

Survival gaming with a powerful sense of the inevitable

Publisher | Good Shepherd Entertainment

Developer | Ace Team

Format | PC

Origin | Chile

Release | 2020

Crack your shell, and it’s the first thing you see: broad as a tsunami, tall as a mushroom cloud, blazing like a forest fire. Videogames aren’t exactly running short on global armageddons, but the Cylinder is one of a kind – an almost comically implacable force, grinding up landscapes laid down moments before by the game’s procedural generation systems.

It rarely gives us a moment to breathe during our hands-on, and yet, there is something consoling about it. Held back for brief intervals by ancient towers, the Cylinder limits your time within each swathe of randomised terrain, and thus avoids the exhaustion and aimlessness so many games that proffer ‘endless possibilities’ inspire. It’s a source of terror, yes, but it’s also a reminder not to get over-attached to things, and if nothing else, it leaves you in no doubt as to which way you should be heading.

Where the Cylinder simplifies, flattening alien ecosystems that recall the menageries of Ace Team’s previous Zeno Clash games, players must aspire to ever greater biological complexity. You play a Trebum, a squishy, two-legged bundle of joy with a prehensile trunk and a very unusual digestive system. Based on Q*bert, one of gaming’s own primordial critters, the Trebum begins each run at the bottom of the food chain but is able to evolve rapidly by hoovering up seeds and eggs left by other creatures.

There are around 50 individual mutations and none of them are just for show. The possibilities include springier legs, spiky skin, thick fur for freezing conditions, detachable eyes for aerial recon, and the ability to shoot acid from your trunk. Choice of mutation is constrained a little by body part, but few mutations are mutually exclusive and, in any case, they can all be reversed - sometimes against your will.

It’s not long before you encounter other Trebums, though you’ll generally need to hatch them out first. Once folded into the herd, players can switch between creatures freely, endowing each with traits for different situations. It’s something of a nomad village simulator, with mutations that recall crafting facilities in less-eccentric survival games: one turns the Trebum into a walking factory, boiling down everything it eats into a kind of organic currency. “When I say ‘survival game’ you’re maybe thinking, ‘Okay I go here, I collect wood, I build a structure’,” Ace Team co-founder and game designer Andres Bordeu tells us. “That’s not the case – this is more about building a little family and using their abilities to thrive.”

You’ll have to to contend with both friendly and unfriendly lifeforms during your journey away from the apocalypse. Among the less threatening is a giant pearlescent snail that can be tempted from its shell with the right food, though we’re forced to move on before we can manage this feat. Later, a gaudy winged predator makes off with one of our hatchlings, forcing us to seek refuge in a curious stone temple. Here, we acquire a mutation that renders us cuboid, using this to squeeze into a chamber where a mysterious elder Trebum informs us that we are heirs to a lost civilisation. “Beware the servants of the Cylinder,” it intones. We encounter one of these servants shortly after: a horrible fusion of animal and automobile, which proceeds to chase us into a canyon full of poison vapour.

These cyborg abominations reflect Ace Team’s love of Surrealist art, but there may be a more literal-minded explanation for them in the backstory. “Survival games are generally not that story-driven, but in this case we’re taking a lot of time with the narrative," Bordeu adds. “There will be sequences that explore the lore, why the Cylinder is there, why these structures are there.” There are depths to plumb, then, for those who find a spare moment between mutations, though we doubt any of them will prove quite so mesmerising as that steadily advancing horizon.

“This is more about building a little family and using their abilities to thrive”

The game’s UI is still under construction, but broadly consists of an inventory bar for items you’ve swallowed. You’ll presumably add more features to it as you mutate

RIGHT It’s not clear whether actual Trebum sex is part of the package. The voiceover suggests that this is a kidfriendly game, but the art direction has decidedly Freudian overtones

LEFT The Trebum AI is pretty good at staying out of harm’s way, but there are predators to worry about. Lose a Trebum and you might have to backtrack to reacquire its mutations.

BELOW Part-mechanical creatures point to a fallen high-tech world but are more arresting when you don’t reach for some potted backstory explanation

ABOVE The narrative is put across by a storybook narrator who recalls Stephen Fry’s turn in LittleBigPlanet. The exposition is perhaps unwelcome, but the writing is certainly charming.