Comfort and Wonder in Simplicity: Eternal Senia

Sometimes all it takes to touch my emotions is a little personal story. In fact, little stories work so well because they are completely isolated and noise proof, allows the audience to experience the idea or emotion you want to convey easily. If the story is succesful, it can make your every second experiencing it feel great without worrying about things like twists or plot fatigue.
Such is Eternal Senia, a RPG-Maker game made by almost one person. The story is clear: You are trying to rescue your elder sister and so you need to clear the dungeons along the way. At first that might sound like an excuse plot and it might have very well could be yet the story turns out to be emotionally striking and fulfilling,  because it has just right amount of ingredients in it. There is no grand philosophy, no over arching plot: Just a young woman's determination and sometimes that's all you need to "get the feels"

"I believe that gaming should not be anything complicated or difficult, but a relaxing and pleasure experience. " From the Steam page of Eternal Senia

Gameplay fulfills the stated purpose from above very well with a real-time battle system, When you attack monsters, you just go near and slash them and in the process you take some damage in return. You get some skills to space things up and of course enemies will get their own various tricks, but at no point the game tries to really stress, annoy or even seriously challenge you in some way. The game is just challenging enough to avoid feeling of just holding a button and moving forward and easy enough to be relaxing. I usually find simple dungeon crawling to be relaxing in itself but this game achieves this feeling with elegant and charming simplicity.

When you saw the words "RPG Maker", it is possible that you imagined a sloppy game and I am just praising the lack of effort of the developer just because I like simple stuff. However, when you play the game it really becomes clear the simplicity and the charm of the game is not an accident, the game is exactly great because it avoids many pitfalls of RPG Maker games and first-time video games fall into. It doesn't bite more than it can chew, it doesn't try to be edgy, pretentious or grand, it just wants to be an amazing small game and you can really see the humility and honest effort in every pixel in the screen.
Actually calling the game "small" is really telling how effective was the game on me. Because the gameplay time actually shows 8 hours and that's more than a lot of short indie games offer and it's even more than gameplay time of Call of Duty 1! In a way the game being so tight and compact reminded me of Final Fantasy 4, another RPG which I also very much love because of its clarity and humility and arguably Eternal Sonia is even better on these aspects.
English is not the main language of the developer, as you can realise from the quote above. Thankfully besides one or two weird-ish words, the game's English text is well structured and sounds right. In other words, it is better than some AAA localizations!
I like this game so much, not only because it made me cry, feel fuzzy and warm in a couple of hours, also because it reminded me the importance and power of the little stories and taught an aspiring game dev and writer a valuable lesson in having achievable goals and not to underestimate what a single person can do even on their single games. That's why I am proudly shilling for this game: Play Eternal Senia. Let this free game on Steam charm you with its chill and cute soundtrack, simple gameplay and heart-tingling story. The game probably works on a toaster and requires very little energy from player. Giving your time will be totally worth it!