From The Deadly Tower of Monsters to Zeno Clash, there are few independent developers working today with output as consistently unique as ACE Team. Any project from the Chilean studio is worthy of at least a passing glance thanks to its strong visual design and drive to innovate new ways to play. The developer's upcoming release, The Eternal Cylinder, is worth much more study than a quick glance, offering a compelling premise alongside some striking visuals.
Combining elements of everything from the Zoombinis franchise to Frozenbyte's Trine series, it's hard to nail down an exact genre for The Eternal Cylinder. Players take control of a race of aliens known as Trebhums that resemble what Q*bert might look like if rendered a bit more realistically. They are the last of a once-thriving civilization and must use their natural powers to instantly evolve based on their diet to solve environmental puzzles and escape the looming menace of the Cylinder. Players can eventually switch between different Trebhums at will and have them adapt differently in order to keep every useful power in play.
Exploring The Eternal Cylinder's environment is nice, but the Trebhums are on a strict time limit thanks to the titular machination that threatens them. While it's difficult to witness it up close, the Cylinder's path of destruction crushes everything on the planet with impressive results not dissimilar to ACE Team's other rolling stone protagonist in Rock of Ages. Structures crumble, trees bowl over, and creatures meet their untimely ends. Seeing the giant tube tower over everything in the environment at all times provides a palpable sense of the foreboding and forward momentum, even if there's no real explanation as to why it's bearing down on the entire planet.
In fact, the available beta build of The Eternal Cylinder is light on explanation and heavy on promoting exploration. While the adventure's narrator sometimes pulls a Bastion and points players in the right direction, the gameplay is often just as much about poking at the world and seeing what happens than it is about actually making progress. The act of sucking up items from the world with a Trebhum snout and then consuming it to transform comes through purely through gameplay, and it immediately presents what feels like endless options for future challenges. With the developers promising over 50 different transformations in the final game, there will certainly be a lot of variety to discover even when player expectations fall back down to terra firma.
As could probably be expected in an ACE Team production, every creature design on the alien world is both beautiful and hauntingly weird. While the small elephant puffballs roll around the landscape like Sonic the Hedgehog, they'll pass by walking maws with teeth pointed towards the ground and insectoids hauling giant sacs of green goo. There are many space-faring adventures in popular culture that keep things relatable with their alien designs, and it's so refreshing to see just how bizarre each aspect of The Eternal Cylinder's world truly is.
The Eternal Cylinder doesn't have a set release date as of yet, but what's already playable shows a lot of promise. Several of ACE Team's experiments have been interesting if lacking a bit in being particularly playable, but The Eternal Cylinder is instantly familiar despite being wholly unique. The platformer-esque controls and environmental puzzles bring back gameplay mechanics that haven't been as much in the spotlight recently, and pairing them with a world that needs to be seen to be believed is an alluring move. The Eternal Cylinder is certainly something to watch for this year.
The Eternal Cylinder is slated for release in 2021 on PC, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One. Screen Rant received a PC code for the beta for the purposes of this preview.