The Steam Next Fest is here, and alongside it come many demos, all with fresh new concepts that only indie games can get away with. One of them is Eternights, which mixes hack-and-slash gameplay with dating sim mechanics.

The game starts out with our self-insert and his best friend, Chani, trying to get girls through dating apps, which doesn’t work. Chani is a pretty fun character; he’s the game’s main source of comedy, and most of it lands pretty well.

After a day with no matches, Chani finds yet another dating app that promises to instantly match two people together. Our character reluctantly tries it out and does get matched with someone who proposes a date to him.

The girl is very forward with the main character, even offering to send some spicy pictures, and he is eventually roped into going on a yacht date with her. After going to sleep, our character dreams about getting his arm cut off and fighting monsters inside a subway station, which serves as foreshadowing.

This section gives us a break from the plot and introduces us to the combat, which isn’t very good. Eternights is charming as a visual novel but unfortunately doesn’t come close to a competent hack and slash title. There is barely any weight to the combat, perfect dodges are ridiculously easy to pull off, and most importantly, there is one combo.

Most of the damage is done by a final strike after doing the only combo available (X, X, X, X, X), which makes the combat feel even worse, because most of the time it feels like you aren’t doing enough damage.

Our character wakes up a bit shaken from his dream and sets off towards his yacht date. On his way to the subway station, multiple explosions go off, and giant walls are erected around the city, essentially closing everyone inside.

It’s implied that this concoction called Eternights, which supposedly was meant to keep people young forever has leaked in multiple cities around the world. The Eternight twists people into monsters, and the game actually has some really interesting designs for them.

Some people’s skins become completely hardened and blackened, while others have been turned inside out or have multiple limbs attached to each other. Some of the body horror aspects seem inspired by Junji Ito, as we see a girl with multiple faces like Tomié, while others look like H.R. Giger’s biomechanical monstrosities.

After all hell breaks loose, we head towards shelter with Chani and get locked inside these bunker-like rooms for a few days. Our bromance with Chani is cut short as the doors seemingly open by themselves, and we bump into Yuna, an idol that Chani really likes.

Yuna is an alright character; her personality is “girl”, and there isn’t much to her aside from the fact that someone in a dream gave her healing powers. Yuna is accompanied by her bunkmate, who is written to be really unlikeable, so we don’t feel bad when she brutally dies five minutes after being introduced.

While looking for an exit, the group bumps into what I can only describe as the female anime version of Sans from Undertale, and the main character gets his arm chopped off, just like in his dream. A long plot dump happens during another dream sequence, in which it’s revealed that the girl who matched on the dating app with our protagonist is basically god.

It turns out that there are architects in the world, and while this girl made humanity and everything else, there’s another architect called Umbra who wants to make everything worse. We don’t get any details on what worse means, but it’s implied that Umbra is responsible for the Eternights substance leak.

The architects can essentially force each other into a deep slumber by using the seed of a tree, which Umbra is currently cultivating in the hopes of dethroning the current goddess. The walls that erected around the city have been built strategically around the tree, which resides in the middle.

The goddess is a pretty charming character, despite just being a black silhouette with hair and no name. She gives the main character a glowing arm to replace the one he lost and constantly tries to hype him up, despite the fact that she’s sending him to die in a fight against another god.

After that, the main character wakes up, and we get a pretty stale boss fight against a big enemy. His design is actually really interesting, as he’s this squalid man squatting on top of two stalactites, wielding a hammer that’s made from two human hands holding massive crystals from each side.

If his encounter was as interesting as his design, I would have a lot to say. Unfortunately, his only mechanic is a barrier that you have to break by hitting him enough; there’s barely any challenge to the fight, and it suffers from all of the gameplay issues I mentioned earlier.

After the fight, the demo ends. It clocks in at about 45 minutes, and it’s a pretty bleak look at what could have been great. Eternights has some really cool monster designs, as well as a few charming characters, but also suffers from some really bad gameplay.

The game is impressive in its other aspects, even sporting some anime cutscenes for major story beats, but the combat is absurdly shallow. It really just makes me wonder: Is it too late to turn this game into a turn-based RPG?

Eternights is set to release on September 21st, 2023, for the PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, and Microsoft Windows (through Steam).

If you want to know more about some upcoming games, take a look at some of the other titles we covered from this year’s Steam Next Fest.