How many games feature an elderly protagonist? More often than not, we find ourselves playing as plucky and attractive youngsters, superpowered teens, or occasionally a gruff dad. But what about an old man with a walking stick?
Well, that’s who you play as in platformer adventure The Eternal Life of Goldman, from developer Weappy Studio and publisher THQ Nordic. And if an old man may seem like a slow, weak character with a lack of ability, you’re forgetting the walking stick. Because the obvious thing to do with a walking stick is bounce on it. Naturally – this is a video game after all.
If that sounds like a callback to NES classic Duck Tales, you’d be right. Indeed, the game as a whole is a callback to the past, but with plenty of modern twists. This isn’t just a walking stick, but a multi-faceted tool with three interchangeable parts: the handle, the point, and the stick itself. By collecting new parts the old man gains new abilities, like the aforementioned bouncing, and a hook to interact with floating platforms – or, as with one boss, to pull on its tail to stun it.
There’s plenty of potential in that upgradeable stick, then, though the game won’t be structured strictly as a Metroidvania. It will feature challenging and precise platforming and seamless exploration, but won’t include any backtracking. Instead, the world comprises a central hub with various individual but linked areas to explore through linear progression.
And those areas are gorgeous. It’s the visuals that give the game a stunning first impression, all hand-drawn frame-by-frame to give the feel of an old animated movie with the action of classic platformers. Cuphead is an obvious comparison, but gameplay here is far more approachable.
I was shown, at Gamescom, the opening scene from the announcement trailer (above) and could play a section of that first level. The camera swoops and dives as it follows a monkey creature through what looks like an oppressively humid jungle and into a dangerous cavern of brutal traps and collapsing floors – all very Indiana Jones. Then as the jungle and its inhabitants burn, the old man protagonist appears on the scene and we slip seamlessly into gameplay.
From there it’s typical stuff of springing across floating platforms and devising new methods of crossing ever-increasing chasms, with some light puzzle solving. Yet wrapped up in those visuals, it’s a delight to play.
It’s clear a tonne of work has gone into this – development began in 2017 and the team is around 25 people. Of course, this kind of hand-crafted visual style takes time but the effect is worth it, with a surprising amount of detail to the game’s foregrounds and backgrounds to give a sense of a bustling jungle teeming with life. It’s a shame the developer even has to specifically point out that no AI has been utilised in the making of the game, but this is 2024 after all.
Come for the visuals, then, but stay for the existential philosophy. The old man protagonist isn’t there just as an ongoing joke to see him thwacking enemies with a cane. It’s an opportunity to tell a story that explores the meaning of life and death through ancient fables – Greek, Jewish, and Mesopotamian folklore legends, to be precise. In such a short preview I didn’t get to see much of the narrative, but its potential reminded me of novels like Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, or Jonas Jonasson’s The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. There are already obvious touches too: checkpoints, for instance, are phoenixes, which is one of those things that’s so smart yet so obvious and so fitting with the game’s theme.
The developer promises the game will have bizarre enemies, nightmares and wonder on its quest to kill a god, with some sort of existential twist too. And it’s this that has me most intrigued about the game. The Eternal Life of Goldman looks set to be an intergenerational platformer, with gameplay and visuals old and new, and a thought-provoking plot. I’m ready to leap in.