In honor of the spooky season, I made myself go back and finish a visual novel that I picked up close to a year ago: Eternal Torment. It’s an unusual genre-bending fantasy visual novel with a heavy torture element and a ton of bad endings where the protagonist ends up dead or mind broken.
The protagonist is a slave who goes by the name Snow (and derivatives like Neige), living in a realm with all sorts of strange monster-people and one primary law: you are either a slave or a slaveholder. Snow is the slave of a weak perverted tentacle creature who wants to increase his status through his slave’s only talent, dance. When dancing before the king of this realm, Snow comes into contact with the King and absorbs his immortality through osmosis, becoming immune to death, but not torment, hence the title. Shortly after that Snow escapes the realm through a portal to our world, and the King sends minions after her because he wants her head.
I had to return to Eternal Torment because, when I first played it, I had to stop out of disgust around the halfway point. I had expected rape, and torture, intermixed with intimacy, and freedom. A character who might start out weak, but had limitless potential to grow. All of that content exists in Eternal Torment, but it is how it assembles these that makes Eternal Torment a game I can’t stand. Euphoria deals in similar tropes and remains in at least my top 10 visual novels because it forges a story with stakes, with characters that feel real — sometimes painfully real — and there are clues and details for the reader to work out the greater truth.
Eternal Torment gets a few of its characters right, and that’s about it.
The Good
Now that I’ve sufficiently biased you, I’ll point out some of the reasonable parts of Eternal Torment. The music and background visuals are standard fare but work for the game. The translation did a good job with the weirdness that happens in-game based on how Snow travels a historical Earth, encountering a variety of cultures and languages, and doesn’t make any obvious mistakes. The CG art has a sort of faded pastel coloration that is unique and really plays up Snow’s innocence, and contrasts well with the red of blood and represented torture objects.
Eternal Torment is a competently built visual novel, but its story design is awful, and its world is frustrating and hateful. There are no avoiding spoilers here, I am going to reveal everything it does worst, and why I don’t think anyone should play Eternal Torment. Why I had to step back and wait a couple weeks to write this review.
Story — How Nonsense Shatters Investment — Spoilers
Snow is a very weak character when we meet her. She can’t resist being raped, can’t speak up, can’t even decide if she wants to stop being raped. She has no history because of amnesia from before she became a slave, so literally has no other personality. This gets tiring fast, but isn’t that bad in the scheme of things. Snow’s growth is enjoyable while it’s happening, and she learns to stand up for herself and others.
Sadly her growth is undermined by the gratuitous rape-happy nature of the game.
Snow becomes tough and can defend herself? People she cares about are held hostage so she can be raped a lot anyway.
Snow has people she cares about? Sorry, every secondary character she likes is only in one Act except for the aforementioned hostage, and every single one gets tortured and raped whether Snow is weak at the time, or super strong.
Tries to help people? Nope, being strong isn’t enough.
Learns about her history? This matters least of all because her history is a nonsensical mixture of genres and illogical construction that doesn’t come up until the short Act 4, and very very short Act 5. You can guess about her if you’re genre-savvy, but the game isn’t a mystery, there’s nothing here to cleverly solve.
Eternal Torment finally reveals that the King is future-Snow. I guessed this because the King is the only immortal, but there aren’t any other clues. Her getting immortality causes the universe to glitch. You learn this from Zowabo, a guy who dumps exposition on you and is supposed to fix the time loop this creates.
The King is Snow. Snow is actually a Japanese girl from 20xx who wandered through a portal into another realm. The other realm was made by an immortal King who experienced the end of all existence and wanted to make life to stop being alone. And Snow wandering through the portal created a time loop of: portal>realm>immortality+escape>King>portal. Do you see the problem? The portal can’t exist if the realm doesn’t, and it is moving through the portal that creates the conditions for the realm. This is a poor attempt at a grandfather paradox. Made even poorer when it is handwaved that killing pre-Snow girl doesn’t end the loop, another Snow will just wander into another portal to become immortal anyway.
The exposition also reveals the core problem of the game’s narrative design. The game denies Snow’s agency, and thus the player’s.
Snow has to kill the King to end the time loop, which is important because the timeline is supposed to be different. Then we are told that Snow had to be raped and mistreated, see friends killed, and suffer everything in the game because if she didn’t she wouldn’t have the heart to kill the King. We are told that if she is protected from the suffering she won’t sacrifice herself. Rape and torture explicitly make her morally strong and are enforced by the story as the only way she can be good.
This de-humanizes the person we’re supposed to care about, who we’ve seen grow. Eternal Torment telling us that torturing Snow is important for the universe to work correctly is heinous makes her growth meaningless, and demands we accept her abuses were necessary instead of tragic.
The game also has a problem with men. There isn’t a redeemable male character in the game, including Zowabo. He’s not a rapist, but justifying Snow’s abuses might make him the worst male. Every random man who has any chance to rape does. A non-rapist is a dedicated murderer instead. The best man is a vampire lord who takes Snow against her will and keeps a harem of women who get to live centuries longer in wealthy conditions if they have a relationship with him — in medieval Europe where they’re likely to die of plague, starvation, or war if they don’t. In Eternal Torment women can be abusers, but men all are.
Critically reading Eternal Torment I come away with one sick premise: men and women are immoral by nature, and it is only through grotesque levels of suffering that they can become moral. The reason men in the game all rape, or at least justify rape? Because they haven’t suffered how women can, and they’re part of a group or society that justifies abuse. The reason some women are awful, and others nice? The awful ones prevented abuse by taking on the mantle of the abuser, and the good ones have been treated as less than human.
This premise is nauseatingly nihilistic, makes its characters not worth caring about, and combined with the time loop nonsense is actively evil, enforced by the story’s universe so that the universe itself is the villain. Very well then. Eternal Torment‘s universe can burn.
Conclusion
Don’t buy Eternal Torment.
