After years living abroad, you come back to your hometown Kredon where you'll spend your last year of university in a student-exchange program. After getting yourself a neural-implant, you get to enter the game of Eternum, a magic filled fantasy world with endless content that counts close to a billion players, but this game seems to be hiding some dark secrets... What will you uncover?
In Eternum you play a male-protagonist native to US who has been living abroad in Europe for the last ten years. During your last year of university you get the opportunity to join the student exchange program and study at the elite university of Kredon, in your hometown. You're very much a virgin but you're not particularly an ugly guy. An average guy in his late teens!
You have two best friends: a Asian guy named Chang. Quite the weirdo yet a very good friend that you've known for more than ten years. His tastes in women are... particular. Let's say he likes them with some muscle. A LOT of muscle.
Your other best friend is Annie, she was your next-door neighbor from the day you moved in Europe with your father. She's extremely cute, a brunette with a petite silhouette, green eyes and a adorable face! She's also a heavy gamer spending a lot of time of Eternum, which we'll mention a bit later.
You didn't move back to Kredon alone, you took your two best friends with you! While Chang found a family to stay at for the duration of his studies, you and Annie will stay at your old baby-sitter's house, Nancy.
Despite not having seen her for more than a decade, Nancy is far from being an old "nanny". She's a very fuckable redhead MILF with huge boobs who's quite on the horny side. She also has two beautiful daughters that you used to play with when you were a child, Dalia and Penelope. The first one is your age and will be in your class while the second one is slightly older and is trying to become a professional model.
From here you pretty much start your adventure in the game. You'll already notice the quality of the 3D environments and characters, the few animated scenes adding to the immersion and the first-class humor (Micaela of the Boreal Valley totally got me laughing my ass off, if you already know what I'm talking about).
And your first day at school will be quite full of adventures as well! You'll meet the son of the biggest shareholder of Eternum the video game everyone is talking about (and eventually get to punch him in the face depending on what choice you make). You get familiar with your classmates and all the "groups" within the class. You fantasize about Dalia during class (I mean she's very hot after all), and you might or might not see her naked in the bathroom by "mistake" after school.
At night you'll join a little quizz show organized in a local bar in which you'll eventually win a neural implant for Eternum, and since these things go around at $2500, it's quite a nice prize!
A few years ago, the company Ulysses created their first game: Eternum. A hyper-reality MMORPG that revolutionized the world of gaming. Through their proprietary neural implant, the games reproduces the 5 senses and makes it the most realistic game is the world. If you can't die in there, you can still feel pain. And a game with so much realism also comes with drawbacks: black markets, torture, rape, underage sexual abuse and so on...
Despite these facts, governments take no part in fixing these issues and the game keeps running on its own laws and police.
Since this review is not destined to be a walkthrough, I'm not gonna go in detail regarding what you will have to do in Eternum. To be honest, your character is not so sure about what to do there either, apart from having fun (you can go to the brothel and have realistic sex there, which is the first reason why people actually play the game).
The plot evolves a lot from there and oh boy there's a lot to be discussed but I just can't find the courage the spoil too much since you should totally play the game yourself!
Eternum isn't just your typical adult visual novel. If you've already played Once in a Lifetime by the same developer then you know you're in for a very well written story, some amazing character development, and the right balance between humor, romance, horror and drama. It's what it takes to make a great game: balance.
And this balance is also reflected in the way your relationship develops with every character and the way sex is present in the game: it's actually quite believable. At this stage the game is not filled with adult content yet what is there feels right.
Also despite not being voiced, the game has a great soundtrack that matches each scene and atmosphere you'll see. It might not seem like much at first, but it's quite diverse and it really feels like it's been selected carefully since I don't remember a tune being out of context, but rather enjoying how well it would complement the visuals.
Sometimes when we decide to review a game, we kind of expect to get another recycled harem visual novel where all the girls are craving for your cock and where you'll have to perform the same actions over and over again to level up their affinity or else and finally get some good sex.
Eternum made a different choice. The progression is linear but the choices are not. Which means you don't ever get bored and your decisions and actions actually have an impact on the dialogues and your relationship with the characters. And the characters are very convincing! You still have some archetypes such as a shy girl, a rebellious one, a "bitchy" one and whatsoever, but they have actually have depth. You might not be into one particular type but you'll still enjoy talking with them because they are so well written.
Same goes for the impact of the animated scenes in the game. They didn't just animate the sex scenes, which would sound like the priority in an adult game, they also used animations to make an impact on the story-telling. It really gives you that "wow" effect when you're in the middle of a tense scene and on your next click some shit goes on, fully animated in the most compelling way.
In the current version we've tested, we can't say we have been showered with sex scenes, yet what we've seen is absolutely gorgeous. As we've mentioned before, it's not about the quantity but how well it is served and how good it looks.
The female models themselves have stunning bodies, nothing exaggerated or unrealistic. The whole game is made with 3D renders so you'll totally get a more immersive sensation in general, especially for sex scenes.
The 3D animations that you will get when it matters are totally fantastic. It's not just some basic limbs animations, you get full body animations and camera movements as well! You can practically feel the touch of their skin and the bounciness of their boobs if you focus hard enough!
There are no two ways to put this: just play the game. Your only regret by the end of the current version will be to not be able to play more of it. You will love the intrigue, you will love the characters and you will love the humor and the effort that was put in this game altogether.
