Dating at the end of the world: in Eternights, even the apocalypse can’t stand in the way of love
Eternights combines the action-packed spectacle of a PlatinumGames title with a darkly funny dating simulator. At the beginning of the game’s Steam demo, you are building an online dating profile with your friend, and a woman texts you to meet up. By the time the demo is over, an apocalyptic calamity has destroyed the city you live in and turned its hapless citizens into mindless demons, and your arm has been cut off and turned into a sword. Oh, and the woman you thought you were going to go on a date with has ulterior motives. Standard romantic fare.
Studio Sai founder Jae Yoo worked on the game on nights and weekends while doing a full-time job at Apple, before he eventually left to found his own studio. As Studio Sai’s only fulltime employee, he was responsible for the title’s programming story, modelling and rigging animation – which he learned after downloading Unity and watching YouTube tutorials. He worked with two part-time artists and a parttime narrative designer, along with a composer and sound designer.
Yoo played around with development and made little demos, but he says that it was Atlus’ Persona series which led him to “create a story that moves people and gives them an emotion that will stick with them … It came from a very simple idea. When you’re stuck with someone in a pressure situation like an apocalypse, and you can’t return home or to your regular life, that will create some interesting interactions between player and characters.”
At your home base – a stationary train – you have the option to interact with members of your party. You can choose to console your friends, get to know them more, or outright flirt, and if your conversations go well, you get stat boosts to help with your journey. The action is fairly traditional if you feel at home with other spectacle fighters, with parries, dodges that slow down time, timed button-presses and a number of combos that unlock depending on how you far you have gotten in the dating world. It flows well, and the enemies’ moves are extremely clean and readable.
There is a lightheadedness and acid wit to the conversation choices. Yoo says he was inspired by the tone of zombie comedies such as Warm Bodies and Zombieland, but adds that the game becomes more serious as it marches towards its conclusion.
The game has the time-management system of a Persona title, too, where you have to choose what you want to accomplish each day and learn to stick to your decisions. Yoo says he wants players to feel pressured about their choices, and he found the action genre to be a more intense choice than turn-based combat.
There will be four big dating options in the final game, and the ending will be dramatically different for players who make different choices. You can enter a same-sex relationship, date multiple partners, or even complete the entire game without choosing to date anyone – though according to Yoo, absenting yourself entirely from the dating world
will lead to a “boring ending and boring gameplay”. That in itself is a dating lesson, I guess: even if things seem apocalyptic, you have just got to put yourself out there.
• Eternights will be out on PC and PS5 on 21 September.