Eidolon Review (PC)

poor
key review info
  • Game: Eidolon
  • Platform: PC
  • Show system requirements
  • Gamepad support: No
  • Reviewed on:
Eidolon

Eidolon is the kind of thing you'd really love to like, because it seems like it's something that has a genuine soul and is not just about hi-fiving your rugged fratboy clique.

Unfortunately, it also feels more like a skeleton than a fully fleshed game, a world abandoned before it had the chance to be molded into a cohesive product that offers an interesting experience.

The endless walking while looking at the same handful of sprites and the occasional stutter, together with the lack of interaction other than reading seemingly random and magically appearing documents, make Eidolon into something less than what its description entails.

Story

The game takes place in a vast post-human landscape, offering players the chance to explore the great outdoors around the Western Washington area, and to uncover the stories of the people who once lived there.

The memories of the dead human culture are scattered throughout the environment, now taken back by nature, with the occasional decrepit reminder of our past rule, and curiosity is the main driving force behind the entire adventure.

Gameplay

The game is all about exploration, going through the forest following some scant clues and trying to piece a larger story together bit by bit. The bad thing is that the meaningful bits seem randomly scattered all around the forest, and you risk pointlessly wandering for extended amounts of time, without anything to do.

At certain points, you come across colored blobs that are either a new piece of the story, a portion of a map or some other such artifact, in the case of the green blobs, or a bow, a compass or fishing pole, in the case of the white blobs.

In addition to this, you will also stumble upon mushrooms and berries while trekking through the woods, which you have to collect in order to avoid starvation. There are some very subtle and unintrusive survival elements thrown into the mix, in order to prevent you from falling asleep, but that's pretty much it.

It's an experience similar to the one in thatgamecompany's Journey, where there is no gameplay, you just have to find something to weigh down your forward key and enjoy the ride without doing much, only there's not much of a ride in Eidolon either.

Eidolon can look beautiful at times
Eidolon can look beautiful at times
The absence of gameplay is a very weird occurrence in my point of view, as games are usually designed around a certain goal, and having a world and no goal (not even the tools necessary to create your own goal, like in Terraria or Minecraft) seems gratuitous.

Offering no initial incentive and nothing to do or set you on a certain path, Eidolon risks losing your interest before unveiling anything noteworthy. The documents and scribbles you come across reveal little about the game's backstory, which could potentially be very interesting, but you wouldn't know because it's so tedious to piece together.

The game uses a minimalistic approach in its artistic direction, portraying a post-human Western Washington locale that could very well be an alien planet. The art style is very simple, yet sometimes pretty effective in delivering the feeling of a vast outdoors space, especially when you find vantage points where you can look upon distant mountain crests and misty hills, and the sprawling forest.

Unfortunately, those experiences are few and far between, and once you see the same vista a couple of times, it starts losing its eerie grasp.

The worst thing about the game is the lack of actual gameplay, the lack of a meaningful direction or structure to the entire experience.

As it stands, Eidolon seems more like a skeleton with placeholder objects to deliver some to-be-implemented mechanics ahead of time for screening. There is nothing to do in the game except for walking, endlessly walking.

During my first brush with Eidolon, I hoped that it would be something like a modern and stylized take on Robinson's Requiem, an old survival and exploration game where you could harvest herbs, brew teas as medication, kill tigers and cut up their fur, then harvest threads and sew together clothes for the incoming cold season.

Unfortunately, it just feels like an abandoned project, like a world built for no purpose. You will come across some wildlife from time to time, scampering about, and you'll be able to shoot your bow and fish, but there are no other interactions aside from doing a lot of walking, reading some documents that you manage to stumble upon, and then keep walking until you bump into the next item.

Sound and visuals

The atmospheric noises that you'll encounter during your strolls through the woods will complement the experience quite nicely, but they'll also feel a bit disheartening. Forests simulators usually score quite well, because pretty much everyone loves a sunny hike through bustling Mother Nature, but when the offering doesn't capture the feeling properly, it's also a pretty big letdown.

In the case of Eidolon, the minimalistic visuals that use a very limited and drab color palette ruin the whole thing. Instead of an enthralling and satisfying visual journey, you'll be stuck hearing half of the sounds you are expecting to hear while looking at something that is nothing like you would expect.

The minimalistic visuals would have been an interesting touch, were they not as insanely lo-fi as this. The approach could be interesting, but it's simply too toned down, without enough interesting exploration, feeling like a pared-down version of the real thing, similar to how 3D worlds were recreated from basic shapes and colors at the end of the '80s.

While the graphics look interesting at times, and show some untapped potential, the fact that there is just not enough experimentation with color and shape, feeling more like a sort of realistic programmer art forest than an artistic endeavor to explore something that our eyes do not readily show us.

Conclusion

"How did I end up spending so much time in what is essentially a walking simulator?" I'll tell you how, you don't have anything better to do with your time, like perfecting your build order in Civilization V or exploring the entire map in Skyrim.

The game's main draw is curiosity, the kind of perverted urge that TV series "Lost" preyed upon, where you would see glimpses of something that seems like it would be interesting, and you would tread on, hoping that, eventually, you will get that nagging voice in your head to finally shut up and stop tugging at you, once you discover the source of the mystery.

The problem is that by the time you get anywhere near something that resembles a scratch for your itch, the entire area of your body that prompted the search for it is already decaying, and just like an Alzheimer's patient without a GPS bracelet, you'll find yourself lost in the woods, confused and wondering what exactly it was that you were doing there in the first place, apart from chasing those kids off your lawn, of course.

It has so little genuine content and so spread out that the survival component translates into not falling asleep. It takes too much effort to play it compared to what it offers, with scraps of a lost world fed in a contrived way that, sadly, removes any kind of meaningful interaction.

story 5
gameplay 3
concept 7
graphics 5
audio 6
multiplayer 0
final rating 5
Editor's review
poor
 

Eidolon screenshots (30 Images)

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