Reviewed on PC

Eternal Hope from Doublehit Games is one of those games that just has a lot of heart. One look at it and you’ll likely be reminded of titles like Limbo and Ori and the Will of the Wisps. Like those titles, this puzzle-platformer is filled with artistic charm and thoughtful themes. It’s also a pretty solid gameplay experience overall. It’s not perfect, but it’s a well-meaning title that fans of more somber platformers should check out at some point.

A Tale of Companionship Lost

The tone of Eternal Hope is set within minutes of starting the game. You play as a boy who finds a loving companion, only to lose her when a violent storm hits. You meet a character who tells you that in order to bring your lost love back, you’ll have to collect her soul, which has been broken up into multiple pieces.

Limbo-Like but With Dimension-Hopping

Mechanically, Eternal Hope will feel pretty familiar if you’ve played games like Limbo, Inside, or Little Nightmares. Like those games, you’ll be doing some climbing, tricky jumping, and block-pushing. You’ll even encounter a few environmental threats that require you to move quickly and find higher ground.

You don’t have any attack commands in Eternal Hope. You do, however, have the ability to swap dimensions and move between the worlds of the living and the dead. If you come across an area where you can’t progress by normal means, you can swap dimensions to get a slightly different layout of the land. Typically, this will be in the form of open areas you can pass through or spirits that move platforms around for you or even act as platforms themselves.

Being able to move between dimensions is cool and adds a fun layer to the game. While the puzzle-platforming mechanics of Eternal Hope may not exactly be remarkable, they work well enough and are fairly entertaining. It’s the dimension-hopping, though, that really adds a nice bit of nuance to the gameplay.

The controls of Eternal Hope are simple and work well enough, but they’re a bit floaty. This isn’t a major issue, but it does result in a game that doesn’t feel as tight as it could’ve been. In addition, while you’ll get used to the slightly slippery controls, they could still cause you some grief when you just barely miss a jump.

An Emotional, Artful Journey

The art of Eternal Hope combines silhouettes and colorful backdrops. Visually, the game is really nice to look at and offers nice color usage that’s typically absent in games like this. In fact, the way color is used in conjunction with all the dark shadows and pitch black character models works really well and communicates the more serious nature of the story.

Like the game’s art style, the music is also fittingly sulky. The sullen themes that play on as you explore the world of Eternal Hope do a good job of putting you in the protagonist’s shoes.

It’ll take you about two to three hours to play through Eternal Hope. That’s almost the perfect length because the game’s themes are kind of heavy, so it doesn’t feel overbearing. By the end of it, you’ll likely feel emotionally drained, but it’s a good experience overall. The puzzles are enjoyable, hopping between dimensions is cool, and the dark world is pretty. The game doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary, and the controls could be better, but Eternal Hope is still a solid, heartfelt adventure that you should play if you dig games like Limbo.

Score: 7.5 out of 10

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