DE-Exit Eternal Matters

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DE-Exit Eternal Matters is the latest game from the minds of Spanish developer Sandbloom Studio and published by HandyGames. It is available on PC, Playstation and Xbox Consoles.

Death was just the beginning

Is there life after death? This atmospheric light puzzle platformer with a hint of stealth transports you on a magical journey through a surrealistic afterlife. Embark on an intense cinematic adventure in a warm and inviting voxel world. Explore this deeply reflective experience and find your way out!

A voxel-art style similar to that of minecraft shows 2 skeletons talking to another. Fauna is bunched in places and lanterns hang from the top of poles — The range of colourful characters that you meet all have their own personality

DE-Exit Eternal Matters appealed to me because the story sounded interesting and playing a character that was already dead intrigued me. Solving puzzles along the way was just an added benefit.

Gameplay

You play as a Lux, someone capable of wielding an artefact. Artefacts are used by guardians to travel through the Plane of Memory, allowing them to open doors, destroy crates, and rotate objects. Becoming a Lux is only possible for a select few souls. It can only happen after a guardian has fallen, and a new soul enters the plane. By using the special artefact, one can unlock difficult paths.

Imagine that you wake up in a fantasy world filled with intrigue and surrealism. Who are you, and what are you doing here? Power swirls around you as you navigate over the voxel art world. After some light puzzle solving you meet your first friendly face a guardian named Asem informing you until now he was the last guardian. Asem explains he was aware of your arrival and had to get to you first.

It turns out that you died at the worst possible moment and explains that you are in the Plane of Memory which is a heavenly afterlife. In order to get away from this place before Donovan finds you, Asem hands you his damaged artefact. Donovan once served as a guardian, but he wanted all the power for himself.

A Skeleton hides in some fauna. A dark smokey monster is just visible in front. There is a display showing — Hiding in the grass from invisible monsters that can only be seen using the light from the artefact

Donovan is described as a ‘soul living a lie’ he is responsible for most of the other nine guardians’ demise and seeks complete power for himself. This corruption has started to spread through the Plane of Memory and now places everyone at risk. There are areas where I was stuck by game-breaking bugs. Floors and walls disappear or allow you to pass straight through them, even characters can vanish before your eyes.

Movements

You must hide from invisible monsters when you play some light stealth elements. As a result, I found this somewhat frustrating because they are only able to see when someone shines a light on them from the artefact, but if you shine too brightly, they will see you and chase you. The game contains sections where you’re required to run or escape towards the camera. The camera view at times is extremely poor sticking by boxes or allowing you to see through vast areas. Lux has to climb on vines and boxes, but he can also swim in the water and ride the wind in the void. The puzzles are really quite simple, most involve you either moving a windmill or a block to power a switch. You can spin to destroy some boxes and barriers giving you a handy way around enemies.

Graphics & Audio

The voxel-style graphics are amazing, whatever format you play this on you won’t notice any differences in graphics. While already mentioning the camera issues above there are other areas worth a mention. In certain areas within the town, you can walk straight through the walls, often falling through the map. These problems cropped up pretty frequently so whilst annoying, a patch can easily fix the issue.

Lux swims through the void to reach a new islandThe lighting in the game is definitely a highlight whether you are shining the artefact at blocks to make them glow, or walking through the town you can see how the areas differ.

There are times when the audio is somewhat muffled, thankfully there are character subtitles so I didn’t miss much dialogue. I can’t fault the music as it is a perfect match for the game type, with mellow and relaxing tones that help relax the gamer, especially around death.

Longevity

Playing through DE-Exit Eternal Matters will set you back less than 10 hours for a full completion. This with the pacing of the game felt like a good amount of time. There was never any moments where the game felt dragged out, or it skipped over things too quickly.

There are a number of collectables for the completionists out there, but unfortunately the game itself really only leans itself towards a single play through. Obviously trying to get those extras will bump up the time a little bit more, but overall once you have completed the story, there isn’t much to return for.

Final Thoughts

Whilst not being able to give it a high award, I can still recommend DE-Exit Eternal Matters to gamers who are looking for a nice relaxing puzzler to get to grips with. With the voxel style graphics this will entice a number of fans of Minecraft, and other voxel style games. Unfortunately though, for me, there were too many issues that caused restarts or having to totally reboot the game. Thankfully in this day and age, these issues can be rectified with a patch.

DE-Exit Eternal Matters received the Thumb Culture Bronze Award