What The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED] is
The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED] is a remake of the 1987 game "ETERNAL CASTLE", rebuilt with extra game mechanics, a reworked sound design, polished 2-bit CGA animated graphics and modernized game design. The team behind it set out to keep the memory of the original alive while expanding the experience and preserving the same feel and emotional flow as the classic. It sits in the action, adventure and indie space, with tags covering horror, dark fantasy, surreal, psychedelic, post-apocalyptic, abstract, cyberpunk and dystopian moods, plus interactive fiction, PvE and PvP elements and a 2.5D perspective.
The story runs from a message dated YEAR 2XXX, before the fall of the cyber-net society. Extra terrestrial human colonization units built parallel survival facilities around their root planet to reestablish a self-sufficient ecosystem in space, but terrorist attacks on the main core servers stopped the procedure, and after countless global wars all systems shut down. Polluted waters, climate change, radioactive warfare and missing resources killed most of the humans left on Earth. The last units in space survived for years before their resources ran out, so scavenger units were sent back to Earth to gather materials. One unit went back and never returned. The narrator knows she is in danger and that she needs help, and going back alone is a suicide mission, but the choice is either to go or to let her die.
How a group plays it together
The Steam features list Remote Play Together for this game, so friends can join in through that option rather than needing a separate local setup. Beyond that, the run itself is built around one person pushing through the world: fighting through the Ancient Ruins, shooting through the Forgotten City, sneaking past monsters in the Unholy Lab, and entering the Eternal Castle. The store text also lists PvP among the tags, alongside PvE.
What to know before starting
The goal is to collect all 4 GLIDERS to power up your ship, find all missing FRAGMENTS to get back home, and repeat the dream as many times as you can before reaching the end. Along the way you can use up to 10 different weapons and unlock up to 10 different items. You can either enjoy the atmosphere or speedrun through a post-AI fallout packed with challenges, and the text frames part of the experience as meditating, predicting and waking up in the eternal dream with Adam or Eve. Expect a dark, emotional and abstract tone with horror and surreal imagery, and controller support listed among the tags.