I want to tell you something that will reframe everything about this game before you play it: The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED] is not a remaster of anything. There is no original. The bracketed REMASTERED tag, the CGA visuals, the fake scanlines, the vintage font — all fiction. A game presented as a lost artefact from 1987, rescued from a floppy disk, lovingly restored. None of it happened. Three people built it from scratch in a garage in 2019.

When I found that out, I sat back and thought: that is one of the most committed creative ideas I have encountered in this genre. And then I played it and realised the concept is not just a marketing gimmick — it is the whole point. The Eternal Castle feels like a memory. Not a reliable one. The kind that gets hazier the more you try to focus on it.

Developed by Leonard Menchiari, Daniele Vicinanzo and Giulio Perrone, and released on Steam in January 2019, The Eternal Castle follows a pilot who crash-lands on a strange planet and must recover parts scattered across four distinct worlds to repair their ship. The story is minimal. The atmosphere is not.

Why The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED] stands out

Most cinematic platformers pay tribute to the genre’s past through aesthetic choices. The Eternal Castle goes further — it presents itself as the past. As something you might have played and half-forgotten. I think that is a genuinely bold conceptual move, and it gives the whole experience a texture that no amount of pixel art could achieve on its own.

The GameSpot review described it perfectly: it feels less like how those classic games actually played, and more like our unreliable memory of how they felt. That distinction is everything. And this unique concept helped The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED] getting featured in our article about the best cinematic platformers.

The Story

A pilot. A crashed ship. Four worlds to explore and loot for spare parts. The story is told almost entirely through what you see — the ruins of a post-AI civilisation, the creatures that inhabit what is left, the environmental details that suggest a history without explaining it.

I find this approach works brilliantly here. The game is pretending to be something you half-remember, so a story that resists full comprehension is exactly right.

Graphics

Every scene is rendered in four colours — black, white, and two others that shift from world to world. Characters are mostly silhouettes, chunky pixels arranged in ways that genuinely evoke CGA graphics from the late 1980s. And yet the animation is more fluid than anything that actually ran on CGA hardware — more frames, more naturalism, more expressiveness. It is the best possible version of a game from 1987, not what games from 1987 actually looked like.

What impresses me most is how much atmosphere Menchiari extracts from those four colours. A cemetery lit by lightning flashes. A bombed-out skyscraper at dusk. An underground laboratory in clinical white and green. Each world looks completely different from the last despite using the same technical constraints. That is genuinely clever art direction.

Gameplay

You choose which of the three main levels to tackle in any order — a smart modern addition that removes the brutal frustration of the games it is imitating while preserving their difficulty and atmosphere. Gear upgrades carry over between levels, ammo is scarce, and you can only carry two weapons at once. Every bullet counts in a way that creates real tension.

The platforming is classic genre DNA — committed movement, deliberate animation, a world that rewards patience over aggression. My honest criticism is the same one almost every reviewer flagged: close-range melee combat against multiple enemies collapses into button mashing. The stamina system and block mechanic suggest something more nuanced, but in practice I found myself just swinging until things stopped moving. It is the weakest element by some distance and the one that most clearly shows the indie budget. It never ruins the experience, but it does interrupt it.

Pacing

The game uses uneven pacing in a way that actually strengthens the atmosphere. Quiet exploration sections suddenly give way to intense action scenes, horror imagery, or unexpected cinematic moments that make the journey feel unpredictable.

Rather than building toward one consistent rhythm, the experience often feels fragmented and unstable. That strange pacing fits the dystopian world surprisingly well and helps the game maintain tension throughout the adventure.

Atmosphere

The synth-wave soundtrack is one of my favourites in the genre — warped, slightly wrong, shifting between worlds without losing its underlying sense of something ancient and broken.

Combined with the four-colour visuals and the sparse sound design, The Eternal Castle creates an atmosphere I genuinely struggle to put into words. It feels like standing in front of something you used to know and no longer quite recognising it. Which is, of course, exactly what Menchiari intended.

Where can I play it?

Available on PC via Steam and itch.io, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5. A New Game+ mode unlocks after completion for players who want a genuine challenge. Modestly priced and completable in a focused evening.

Similar games

Players who enjoyed The Eternal Castle [REMASTERED] will likely appreciate other cinematic platformers focused on dystopian atmosphere, experimental storytelling, and retro-inspired sci-fi worlds.

If you are looking for more cinematic platformers with a similar retro-futuristic visual style, games like Lunark, The Way, and Flashback all share pixel-art sci-fi environments, cinematic side-scrolling, and dystopian atmosphere inspired by classic cinematic platformers of the 1990s.