Introduction

Let's Play Eternal Daughter

Around 9 years ago, the fruit of a collaboration of Derek Yu and Jon Perry was born. That fruit's name was Eternal Daughter. Derek Yu has since become incredibly famous across the globe for other games he's been involved in (that you may have actually heard of) such as Aquaria, I'm OK, and Spelunky. Jon Perry, however, doesn't have a wikipedia page, although he (and presumably with Yu's involvement) did release another of their games, Diabolika, onto the iPhone recently.

In addition, Derek Yu made a popular tile set for Desktop Dungeons, so you may have heard of him through that as well.

So what is it?

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ED is a freeware indie game you may or may not have heard of. A lot of gaming press seemed very positive about it at the time, but there seems to be little evidence of its legacy nowadays.

In simple terms, ED is a 2d platformer, and a homage to Metroid and Castlevania. More importantly, though, it was a labour of love (it says so right there in the image). This is a game I'm very fond of, and so far as I've been able to tell, few people have heard of it. And, those who have, are either too scared to play it, got lost, or got stuck on one of the bosses and gave up forever. Add to this the fact that there are some... complications with being able to play it due to how the game was made, and I'd say there's every chance that this gem of a game could be forgotten.

Eternal Daughter was created with Multimedia Fusion, which is roughly a couple of development generations removed from Klik and Play (or Click and Create). Because of this, there are some difficulties with playing it. It seems several of the MMF engine's function calls may not have been updated for a good few years, even at the time of release, and as a result, in anything more technically advanced than windows 98, the music will cause the game to pause for up to half a second every time it plays. Additionally, as compiled, it only supports 2 modes of display: Switching your resolution to 640x480, and then displaying in just one corner, or leaving your resolution untouched but turning your whole screen black and just displaying in a 320x240 patch in the middle. However, I'm familiar with MMF and was able to, with a little bit of hex editing, switch the rendering mode so it runs in a normal window. For reference, a more well known game, Knytt (and associated games) was also created with MMF (Knytt Stories I think was MMF2, although perhaps both were).

How does it work?

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The game doesn't really spend any time explaining what anything is, outside of the help screens on the main menu (posted above). To be fair, if you're familiar with the genre, it's all pretty self explanatory anyway; Get things that are shiny, kill things that you don't like, and try not to die. Also there's a story, but that's what the cut scenes are for.

In order to guide you through it, the game uses a couple of mechanics:
1) Plot - You can go somewhere, but you can't advance past a certain point, due to (plot reasons)
2) Murder - You can go somewhere, but the enemies do so much damage you can't really make any progress (very Metroid)

The game is actually quite short, especially if you don't spend much of your time dying, and fast forward the backtracking/item collection, so hopefully it'll be at home right here in short game theatre.

Anyway, with that all said and done, videos!

I'm chiefly aiming to be informative with this let's play, and show off the game as well as I'm able in the manner it was meant to be played. Later I'll show some of the glitchy behaviour that can be exploited to positive ends.

Episode 0 - Introduction

The Let's Play Archive

Eternal Daughter

by Mastigophoran

Introduction

Contents