The Eternal Life of Goldman played: The 2D platformer leaves Paul speechless – and that’s saying something
Have you ever had sensory overload? That is, when so many different impressions hit you in rapid succession that you sit there afterwards and can only say “Dude, what was THAT?”? That’s how I felt with The Eternal Life of Goldman.
You broke the Kautz!
Watch the recently released trailer below. Please. Watch it, let it sink in – and then tell me you can easily process what you just saw. I’m sitting in the small room at THQ Nordic at gamescom, the product manager in charge is grinning at me, and all I can say is an incredulous “…what? ”
I haven’t had anything like this for a long time. That a trailer, a game, a movie, anything, has left me completely speechless. I remember sitting in the theater during the end credits of The Truman Show in 1998 because the movie completely flattened me. The trailer for The Eternal Life of Goldman had a very similar effect, only for different (and also very good!) reasons.
The design of the game worlds is very wacky. It begins in a broken, burning environment …
GoldmanTales (Woo-Hoo!)
At its core, The Eternal Life of Goldman is a platformer heavily inspired by 16-bit jump-n-runs like 1993Rocket Knight Adventuress. Add a dash of Braid, a scoop of Cuphead, a good dose of DuckTalesand a ton of unusual ideas, and you have an equally wacky and very unique mixture that its developers themselves describe as a “platformer adventure”.
Goldman, as the trailer emphasizes, is no hero. He is an elderly gentleman with a kippah and a walking stick, who is primarily believed to be able to whistle beautiful melodies.But it is precisely the stick that gives him very unusual abilities.On the one hand, he can use it as a powerful pogo stick, just like Uncle Scrooge in 1989’s DuckTales.
On the other hand, Goldman receives more and more practical upgrades for it from ghostly figures in the course of his adventure. For example, a hook that allows him to hang on to rings and pull objects. Or a reinforcement that enables higher jumps. Sometimes even too high, which means you have to perform manual downgrades from time to time. My playable trade fair version contained a passage with nasty spikes shining on the low ceiling. At this point, I had to take out the floor upgrade again in order to be able to pass it safely while jumping lower. According to the developers, the game is supposed to contain small Metroidvania elements like this again and again, but be linear in itself.
Madness from the pencil
The Eternal Life of Goldman’s clever game design is only one reason for my enthusiastic grin – its presentation is the other.The game looks so good!So damn, damn good!
Every pixel of the landscapes and characters here is hand-drawn, the levels boast an overwhelming amount of loving detail, and some of the characters are so imaginatively designed. The Unity engine running as the basis ensures high speed and cool special effects such as heat shimmering or blurring.
Hah. I think that’s great! Just running through the levels, admiring the wealth of ideas and sheer skill of the designers and graphic artists, discovering wacky new details at every turn was so much fun. For example, when you blow open a crate with the baton, its contents are physically correctly distributed in the immediate vicinity
Describing this in a few words doesn’t sound very spectacular –but it looks so cool in motion!During the playtest, it was also emphasized extra-doll that no AI was involved in the development of the graphics. Everything here is still hand-drawn with tons of love
The walking stick of Doom
This little graphic wonder was developed by the Belarusian studioWeappy, which you might know mainly for the rathernot-so-greatenthusiasmtriggeringgames in the seriesThis is the Policeand is also known as the “The Eternal Life of Goldman”. The Eternal Life of Goldman is studio founder Ilya Yanovich’s passion project, which he has been working on since 2017. There is currently no concrete release date, but according to THQ Nordic, the game is already almost finished and a release in 2024 is therefore very likely
So you can look forward to a lot of action based on Jewish, Greek and Mesopotamian fables and tales. A creative world design in which you run through burning landscapes from which grinning balloons rise, or trot through ice forests while thickly blowing snow robs you of your vision. And boss battles where mastery of the handy walking stick is essential.
Editor’s verdict
I’ve just watched the announcement trailer again and I’m still blown away by it. Isn’t it fantastic that they still exist, these wonderful surprises that you just don’t expect? When I arranged to play The Eternal Life of Goldman, I only did so because I still had time and the name sounded interesting. I didn’t even bother to google the game. And now it’s my highlight of Gamescom 2024 so far!
