Etherborn review for PS4, Xbox One, Switch

I?ve got good news and I?ve got bad news about Etherborn.

The good news is that it feels weightless and ephemeral.

Unfortunately, that?s the bad news, too.

In other words, what makes it worth playing is also what, ultimately, makes it kind of forgettable. On the one hand, it all feels kind of dreamlike. You?re wandering through a world where you can run up walls, and where gravity is constantly shifting and moving around depending on where you?re walking. Your character looks like some alien with translucent skin. There?s some mumbo-jumbo story thrown in about birth and truth. All in all, Etherborn feels like an Escher painting come…not quite to life, but definitely to a hazy, multicoloured dream.

Unfortunately, now that I?ve finished it, it feels more like a barely-remembered dream. I know that it got slightly harder the further in I got, but all that sticks with me is that I was running up walls and around corners. Couple that with the fact it was pretty short, and it all blends together in my memory.

That said, it?s a pleasant memory. I wouldn?t say I ever actively disliked any moment of my brief time with the game. The camera was occasionally annoying, but it never got too much in the way. There were a couple of jumps that were hard to judge based on the shifting perspective, but they were never impossible. Etherborn offers a pleasantly unmemorable hour or so, and if you don?t mind a game that?ll be out of your memory shortly after you?ve finished it, you could do a lot worse than experience it?s Escher-inspired trippiness.

Altered Matter Games provided us with an Etherborn PS4 code for review purposes.