The writing isn't riveting enough to keep you glued to the screen for hours on end, yet I stayed. The characters are as compelling as your average harem anime, yet I still fell in love. The story is average at best, the humor doesn't always land, and the author's fixation on themes such as incest and harem will do its best to push you away.
Raised atheist, I always wished for there to be more to things than the casual cruelty of our uncaring reality. Heaven as a concept was something I found myself reflecting on often, especially when life was less than livable - every major religion's depiction is so profoundly inhuman, that it sounded almost worse than hell, the realm of eternal torture (you get to meet a bunch of perfectly obedient 'saints', and feel unity with god, best feeling conceivable - we have that on earth, it's called a fucking crack den (or fentanyl these years)). How do I imagine an environment where I'd be forever happy, while still staying me?
Then on the other hand, we have the autistsperg supreme intellectual elites, yelling at us from their not-so-ascetic pillars, that this is all there is, and we should just deal with it. How do we imagine heaven in something so banal and inconvenient as our own universe?
This piece of slightly interactive media, assembled from figurative sticks, spit, and prayer, in a clumsy, probably unintentional, way answers both of my question with profound ease and elegance. It would've been infuriating, if I actually took myself seriously.
The simple answer is the antidote to the little voice in my head that always wants to keep me down: when it talks about wildly improbable negative outcomes, the answer is to also hope for the wildly improbable positive outcome. "Your flight will end in a plane crash." - "You're just as likely to win the lottery. Buy a ticket."
You have a girl you like? There's nothing in the way, she only has eyes for you, no other guys asking her out, no usual circumstances that fuck things over. Having a problem with an annoying asshole? There's no groupie bitches sucker punching you from behind, the playing field is even, and you have absolute confidence in victory. Managed to finally get a girl into your room, you're a confident dude who worked hard for his lot in life, and on top of that, your donger is the envy of the locker room - while in reality you'll hurt her, cause her pain, freak her out so she doesn't even let you get it in, and when you finally do, it'll be such a miserable ordeal, that it'll mess you up for year to come. All that without even any comorbidities like endometriosis, fibroids, whiskey dick, bleeding (nose and vaginal), or any of the myriad things that are there just to ruin your night. In this game the universe will get on its knees, sensually get your dick out, and give you the sloppiest blowjob of Johnny Sins' life, only stopping to lovingly ask whether you'd like to cum down her throat, or on her blushing, glistening, messed-up-makeup face.
Grab your insecurity, rip off any self doubt, and throw them off a cliff - then let this little if-clause tentacle monster (16750 lines of code added? lmao, yandere dev called, he wants his lack of programming skills back) submerge it in an ocean of confidence - certainty that you won't fuck up. Nothing will fuck it up for you. It won't be weird or awkward. Even defeat is temporary, and still glorious.
I played the first game when I was 25. I couldn't understand then. I think I do now. This 'game' gave me peace. It gave me hope. It gave my insecure self well-overdue closure. RIP in piece in pieces, bitch. Today, I got to feel like my best self.
Despite its many (manymanymany) flaws, Eternum left a stronger impression on me than the likes of Dan Simmon's Hyperion Cantos. Sorry Aenea, you're just too doom and gloom with the martyrcore judeo-christian liveaboard-trustafarian style. I give it the perfect 5/7 score, deserving of a paragraph in my biography, after I win the Nobel prize for the clearest, clarest, flawless sapphire post-nut clarity.
And I haven't finished it yet. I almost don't want to. I don't want it to end.
The MC (I)- he's(I'm) him. 50k+LP hyperborean s*rver rank 1. Get lobotomized, noob.
TL;DR
If you like it, you're a closet misogynist with Oedipus complex, and you make me sick. 11/10