Eternal War: Shadows of Light

Eternal War: Shadows of Light is a Christian themed FPS game from 2002 released by then called Two Guys Software. It runs on the Quake engine and was made by just a few developers (what a surprise!). The story of the game is very simple: You go kill demons inside guy full of demons. That's all there is to the story really. I've had this laying around on my hard drive for a while now, but didn't play it until now. No clue where I found out about it, I guess it came up when I was looking for some Quake mods to play (it was surely a revelation). Time to beat this game is about 3.5 hours on normal difficulty. The game is free and available on the internet archive.

When you start the game, you are greeted with a few pictures in a slideshow that explain what you are supposed to do... except that the slideshow doesn't work and skips the pictures, leaving you without any context. I assume that this is a bug with modern systems, so instead of viewing them ingame, I just went through the game files and viewed the images manually. It's not that important anyway, there's like 10 or so images with a few lines of text in them explaining the story. The first level serves as an introduction to your arsenal of "weapons". Your primary "real" weapons are a dagger, and a crossbow. Soon as you progress through the game you'll acquire magic spells that deal various effects, i call them by their color (their proper names are in the game manual page, but it's not important):

• Blue - Lightning bolt (bad)
• Cyan - Projectile shards or fire blast (overused, decent)
• Purple - Explosion (most overpowered and valuable)
• Yellow - Useless (idk, never used this because the game rarely gave me ammo for it and by the time I got some I figured out the meta with other colors)
• Green - Flak cannon (right click has homing projectiles, good for clearing areas you don't want to expose yourself to)

These spells are basically reskinned weapons and behave exactly like any other weapon in Quake, which means that you have to find "ammo" for them (in this case "mana"). This is a bit of a wasted potential, as they could have made an interesting casting system to make it feel better, but instead it's the same. You also get a cool powerful sword at the end of the game, but you don't get to keep it for very long.

One of the more unique features of the game is the "pray" button that slowly heals you. This practically gives you infinite health as long as you don't die during healing, since it makes you unable to do anything until you cancel it or you reach max health.

The level design starts decently, I liked the first half of the games levels, they were nicely structured and I mechanically knew what to do and where to go next. But after the halfway point, it went completely off the rails and became a wall hugging wall shooting go all over the level nightmare trying to find the way forward. They were also buggy and prone to break in some ways that made the player softlocked and the levels fully unbeatable. I had to skip some levels with noclip to get somewhere, because the way forward was not clear at all, or I was just softlocked and didn't know about it. The later levels really felt undercooked and broken, it would be better if they just cut the game in half instead of trying to force the playtime. Some areas were creative, but other were just baaaad, like some traps that insta kills the player out of nowhere. I liked the architecture and visual look of the levels (except the water texture, that looked like acid puke) and enemies, even though there is only a few enemy variants.

Enemies range from small troops to big boys, often accompanying one another. I feel the difficulty of these enemies is mostly artificial, as in the difficulty comes from their visual representation. Some enemies are nearly invisible and charge at you, dealing tons of damage, and some enemies blind you with lightning and teleport around, leaving you confused and backstabbed. This combined with the games colorful spell casting makes for absolute visual epilepsy at times, which just disorientates the player. In most fights during the game, you'll find yourself just spamming whatever spell or weapon you currently have equipped and pray (hah) that it will do something to something, because you'll most likely not know what or where things are and what is actually happening. It's just way too saturated at times, it needs to cool down a bit. Or perhaps that is my skill issue, it's not like I have experience playing games with seizure inducing colors all the time like some modern MOBAs promote.

Some mechanics that I didn't like were the enemies exploding upon death and the zombies that randomly didn't die for some reason. It seemed too random and annoying at times, like it was added to make the game more confusing by exploding things and making them unkillable for some seconds of playtime (some levels required kills to progress).

The game itself doesn't do anything that is memorable, so most levels are just there to be played once and then forgotten about. There is not much replayability, unless you like visual diarrhea at high difficulties (which I don't recommend, the game was already quite difficult at times on normal).

The final boss is really dumb. I barely knew what was going on during the fight and just spammed the sword right-click until the red man on steroids died. I thought it was funny how the game changed the gravity during the fight multiple times and it showed the command in the ingame chat. That fight was really ... eghhhh...

Overall I enjoyed the first half of the game, it felt like a decent Quake mod with a unique flavor. It is a shame that it went for quantity over quality, as the later levels just sucked. If you're looking for strange games, this one is cool for the first half, so maybe a half playthrough for 1.5 hours is not the worst idea if you're bored enough. Don't worry, you won't miss the second half. Even the final boss sucked bad, so you'll not miss that either.

Note that if you want to play this, DON'T apply the "fog fix" you'll find on PCGamingWiki, it made me unable to progress and left me in a black screen until I reveted the changes!

Published on 28.03.2026