Aeterna Noctis

Two crowns, one endless war

Aeterna Noctis casts its story around the King of Darkness and the Queen of Light, two immortal monarchs cursed to fight one another for eternity, whose journey to break that cycle doubles as a search to rediscover the love they once shared. It's a fittingly grand, mythic framing for a metroidvania built at genuinely ambitious scale by a small studio — Aeternum Game Studios, working out of Spain, self-published this as its debut release across every major platform simultaneously. That scope is visible everywhere in the finished game: a sprawling, densely interconnected world rendered in hand-painted 2D art that draws direct, repeated comparisons to Hollow Knight, not as a knock but as a genuine peer comparison few metroidvanias earn.

A world built to be walked twice, on purpose

The genre's usual structure is here in full — new movement and combat abilities gate off areas of the map until you've found the right unlock, and the game rewards backtracking through familiar corridors once a new tool changes what's possible in them. Several reviewers specifically note that the game's pacing noticeably improves once the ability set opens up in the second half, which is a common shape for the genre but one Aeterna Noctis executes with real conviction rather than padding.

What sets it apart structurally is the choice between two difficulty modes: a more forgiving Action mode, and Noctis mode, which adds a level of precision-platforming difficulty the game's own marketing calls unprecedented in the genre and which longtime metroidvania players in the review corpus back up independently — several describe it as the hardest platforming challenge they've encountered in a metroidvania, deliberately invoking Hollow Knight's infamous "White Palace" segment as the closest comparison. That's a genuinely rare thing for the genre to offer as a real, distinct mode rather than a difficulty slider, and it's a meaningful part of why the game has built a dedicated following among players specifically looking for that kind of test.

Where the challenge lives — and where it doesn't

The gap the review corpus keeps circling back to is between that platforming ambition and the combat wrapped around it. Enemies and bosses are repeatedly described as simple or "brainless" to actually fight, with animation-locked attacks that don't ask much tactically, sitting oddly next to movement mechanics demanding real precision. Worse, several reviewers report that the game's own dense, detailed art can work against readability in combat specifically — enough visual clutter on screen, at points, to make incoming projectiles or attack telegraphs genuinely hard to spot, which undermines the fairness a game this difficulty-focused needs from its combat encounters. It's not that the combat is unplayable — most reviews still land positive overall — but it's the clearest place where the ambition of the platforming and the art isn't matched by every other system in the game.

A smaller, more specific complaint worth flagging: a handful of achievements are reported to require performing actions in a precise, undocumented sequence to unlock at all, an extra and seemingly unnecessary layer of friction in a game whose core challenge is already considerable without it.

Crashes and performance

The most serious technical complaint in the review corpus is crashes severe enough, in multiple independent reports, to erase sections of the map a player had already explored — forcing a re-traversal of already-cleared ground just to redraw it, a genuinely punishing consequence in a genre built around exploration as a core reward loop. Performance on lower-end hardware is flagged separately as a real weak point too, which sits awkwardly against a game that otherwise offers two difficulty modes specifically to widen who can enjoy it — the accessibility gesture only goes as far as the hardware running smoothly enough to take advantage of it.

An ambitious debut, judged against a crowded genre

It's worth being clear-eyed about the company Aeterna Noctis is keeping. The metroidvania genre had an unusually strong run in the years around this release, and the Hollow Knight comparisons that follow this game everywhere cut both ways — they're a genuine compliment to the art direction and world design, and also a reminder of exactly how high that bar sits for the combat and readability side of the equation. A debut studio matching or exceeding that scale of ambition on its first release, even partially, is a real accomplishment; several of the positive reviews in the corpus make a point of saying they're eager to see what Aeternum Game Studios builds next specifically because the foundation here — the art, the world structure, the sheer scale of Noctis mode's challenge — is stronger than the combat and technical execution built on top of it. That's a reasonable way to read the game as a whole: not a finished peer to the genre's best, but a genuinely promising one built by a team clearly capable of getting there.

Value

Aeterna Noctis sits at NZ$43.59 at full price, though it was listed at 80% off, NZ$8.71, at the time of this check — a discount depth that suggests the developer leans hard on sales to move copies, common enough for an ambitious indie debut competing against much larger releases. At either price the value case rests almost entirely on how much the art direction and the Noctis mode's specific challenge appeal to you individually; the 75%-positive Mostly Positive Steam score across more than 2,100 reviews reflects a genuinely divided audience rather than a consensus pick, split largely along exactly the lines this review has laid out — glowing praise for the visuals and the hardest-mode challenge, real frustration with the combat and the technical rough edges around it.