WCCF Tech’s Kai Powell ran along the back of endless space dragons in their review of Cleaversoft‘s mystical platformer Earth Night.
Each level of EarthNight features a fairly straightforward formula: land on one end of the giant wyrm and run your way to its head. What you encounter along the way is always going to be a little bit different, given the game’s influence in procedural generation and random aspects. Dragons aren’t known to have completely straight spines; each level path is filled with natural mounds and dips and even the occasional loop to run around but because this is one continuous beast you’re running across, there’s never a risk of falling off into space.
After slaying a dragon, Sydney and Stanley engage in a freefall down towards the inevitable EarthNight. During this time, you can freely move about during your descent and pick your next target to land upon. Each of the five layers of the atmosphere is host to a select range of dragons and you can choose which one to slay. What I liked for a speedrunning aspect is that if you can navigate through the weaving mass of dragons during your re-entry back to Earth, you can effectively skip entire layers of levels (save for a certain gargantuan dragon that always blocks your way midway down).
EarthNight has some novel ideas when it comes to making an auto-runner worth coming back to time and time again, but the inconsistent difficulty spikes and RNG elements can quickly put an otherwise good run into freefall.
For more information about the developer, check out Cleaversoft’s official website and follow them on Facebook and Twitter. For more information about Earth Night, check out the game’s official website or it’s Steam page.
