The Eternal Life of Goldman; hand-drawn, existential platformer lets you fight a giant bull’s butt

Frame-by-frame animation isn’t easy. When I was 16, I tried rotoscoping the hallway scene from Rogue One. It took me hours, and I was only drawing over frames of footage. I’ve tried animating since, but the amount of time needed to breathe life into something as simple as walking around is, in crude business lingo, uneconomical and inefficient.

Nowadays, game animators working in 2D will use rigging to animate their art. Gone are the painstaking days of animating with a lightbox and paper, instead, they welcome the digital. While most pixel art games do still embrace frame animation, it’s simply cheaper and easier to animate with digital shortcuts instead. So when I first played The Eternal Life of Goldman and saw its enchanting frame-by-frame animation, the gorgeous hand drawn sprites, and the phantasmagorical visual fidelity, I was taken aback. 

The Eternal Life of Goldman is an adventure precision platformer embellished with full frame-by-frame animated visuals and Jewish, Greek, and Mesapotamian mythology. Developed by Weappy Studio and published by THQ Nordic, its release date is still unknown. I played the first level of the game at Gamescom, alongside its producer Andreas Schmeidecker.

It was described to me as an “ode to platformers and animation,” and playing through the first level, I couldn’t help but agree. The Eternal Life of Goldman oozes the playfulness of Mario and Rayman’s early days with Blasphemous’ dialect of grotesque horror grafted on. One moment you’re an old bloke jumping on your cane-turned-pogo-stick, the next you’re pulling a cord out from a giant bull’s arse.

At least, that’s how the first level ends. It’s not all rectal archaeology; there’s clever platforming puzzles and different movement styles available at the flick of a button. Goldman’s cane is his crown jewel. As you wade through the mesh of Disney-like environments and industrial carnage, you’ll find new parts for your cane. Equip the different pieces of bedknobs and broomsticks mid-air to hook onto a floating hoop, or remove a piece while falling to avoid a double-jump into spiked ceilings. With such a simple tool, Weappy had discovered a way for Goldman to interact with his environment in an incredibly dynamic and rarely straightforward movement style.

It’s not just precision platforming to look forward to, but also “big questions of life and death” to philosophise over. Goldman’s an old man, an unlikely choice for a game’s hero. The hints that Schmeidecker has fed me – “existential twist” and “big choices” – alongside the naming ‘Eternal Life,’ seem to suggest that something big, cosmic, and liminal is at play here. The producer tells me that at some point you will kill a god, too.

While I didn’t have that much time with Weappy’s latest title, I was infatuated pretty fast. By its charm? By its horror? I can’t tell. One moment you are wrapped up in the wispy, whimsical embrace of a giant arm stretching out from a mirror, the next you are stomping on a rotten, bulbous flesh hegemon, squeezing out the last few gasps of noxious fumes from its corpse.

While playing, elements of Metroidvanias mull away in the background and at times you might confuse the game for a scene from Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain. The most obvious comparison is quacking about Duck Tales, but I wanted to know from Schmeidecker what exactly inspired The Eternal Life of Goldman.

Schmeidecker suggested that it was “mostly 16-bit platformers like Donkey Kong Country. Some people compare it to Cuphead, which is understandable. I think that’s more how the game is done, not how it plays. There’s a similar level of dedication or craziness.’ In terms of work ethic; Cuphead is the inspiration.”

“It’s not a small game, not a one-session game. We were aiming for between 15-20 hours of playtime. There’s certain replayability, I mean, it’s an open-world game, so maybe you want to speed-run it, or you want an ‘optimal’ run, all the gold – it is a sizable chunk of game.” He continued that he “can’t give details [on a New Game Plus mode], but it would make sense for a game like this.”

Schmeidecker went on to talk about the future of the game, and what that entails in regards to future expansions, DLCs, and any paid additional content that might be in consideration.

“It’s not the kind of game to have loot boxes or whatever. Honestly, I can tell you in terms of the story we want to tell, there is an extra part that would be cool for DLC. But essentially, if we have more story to tell and the experience to do it but not monetise it, that can be done.”

Cover image edited by Video Gamer using license free resources, initial image credits to Weappy.