It's hard to tell a story about the apocalypse when you're in the middle of it. While video games about the end times used to deal with nuclear wastelands, the slow progression of the climate crisis has spawned games that focus more on living with disaster than exploring its aftermath. As far as "Eternal Cylinder" is concerned, that means leading a band of elephant-nosed creatures called trebuchets in the shadow of steamrollers as wide as the horizon, thriving in a wonderful alien ecosystem that is steadily becoming paste.

The trebhum are neither lovers nor combatants, although you operate them individually and the rest of the herd rolls behind. All they can do in the first place is suck and store objects for later consumption, shoot water from their trunks, and roll around like Sonic the Hedgehog. But they have a definite advantage. By eating the right things, from grasshopper droppings to fish, they can acquire mutations like a third eye or fur and (in most cases) survive the trials ahead.

"Eternal Cylinder," a brilliant but slightly lackluster escapade from the punch-drunk creators of "Xeno Clash," mixes moments of frenzy with moments of indefinite contemplation. The game's giant antagonist is not relentless in his pursuit. Towers that shroud their surroundings in shimmering blue energy may block their approach, allowing you to forage in oasis-like areas, toy with mutations, and explore ruins with basic platforming challenges, lore, and rarer consumables.

Here, one is free to indulge in the quirkiness and splendor of a variety of creature designs, from Jormungando-esque astral serpents that mimic paintings by Dali, Picasso, and Bosch, to giant dragonsteppods that create sandstorms when they eat their prey. There are other trebuchets to revive, rescue, or convince to join your herd with the right items. Mixed in with the indigenous life forms are the servants of the mysterious cylinder, a cyborg sentinel. [For example, they investigate the fact that one beast is descended from another, or how to make certain creatures fight each other. The item descriptions also serve as "Just So" stories about the Trebhum people themselves. [It's a pink and purple ice field, a strange coral lattice, a mass of sky-scraping seeds, and so on. But once the dome is breached, all the peculiarities and colors are forgotten in the panic to get to the next tower. The other creatures become obstacles, not miracles of nature, to be chased away or simply overtaken by the blasts of trumpets. Once you escape, you feel a chill as you look back and watch the cylinder finish the job. Then you walk away and experiment anew.

At least when you are not fighting for the initiative. The game's partly procedural terrain is undulating, and trebuchets are not suited to precision maneuvering. Treblum's survival depends largely on strength in numbers, as he will learn when he bounces off the wrong rock and falls prey to something. Fine-tuning the ever-growing herd and redistributing the contents of their stomachs is as laborious as moving around. You can press the shoulder button to switch to the trebuchet you're looking at, or hold the other shoulder button and fly through the herd in freeze time, but it's easier to drag and drop resources from the menu.

If The Eternal Cylinder is unwieldy, it is also overly forgiving. The narrator is very generous with tips and guidance in a "Bastion" or "Stanley Parable" style of ready-made narrative. It's easy to satisfy hunger and thirst even before eating what turns trebhum into a water purifier or a larder.

While the game's narrative mandates that certain mutations be tracked at regular intervals, it is often possible, and therefore tempting, to head in a straight line to the next tower. Theoretically, one would have more trouble with more flocks, but in practice this is not the case. If all else fails, avoid the hazard by running away from the dangerous trebuchet and give your allies a chance to draw you in by teleporting.

The bigger problem is that "Eternal Cylinder" is, on one level, a basic upgrade-a-thon, pretending to be something more bizarre. Once one gets used to its aesthetics, the mutation is surprisingly tedious. Some are one-hit wonders, such as cubing a trebhum into a door key or inserting a sucker foot to keep it from being blown off a windy platform in a shrine puzzle. Others are exotic rehashes of classic moves from other games. They bend their knees to jump higher, inflate their bellies to glide, and slightly increase their water absorption and stamina. The least exciting are the ones that allow you to manufacture crystal currency and buy general stamina and strength upgrades from a shrine. To hell with the Cosmic Bulldozer.

Occasional defeats and evolutionary encounters with the cylinder's minions encourage them to mix things up, but eventually they can make certain mutations permanent. Thus, the whimsy and goofiness of the early game is steadily optimized, transforming your flock into businesslike contraptions such as walking bomb factories and Far Cry-style resource detectors. Less useful or actively disturbing mutations, such as disco skins and sight-impairing eye stalks, are left by the wayside.

The increased emphasis on efficiency could be seen as a provocation. However, the game seems to be succumbing to the conventions of the genre rather than posing such a challenge. While often a visionary work, The Eternal Cylinder falls a few mutations short of brilliance."