Have you ever wondered what it’d be like to explore a “post-apocalyptic” world? Eidolon takes you there, placing you within Northwestern Washington.
Eidolon takes place in a time where humans are gone. You start within a forest in Northwestern Washington with nothing in hand. You can head out to explore. While exploring, you can find remnants of those who were there before such as journal entries. You can also find survival pieces – a fishing pole, a bow and arrow, a compass, and binoculars. There’s also apparently a map that was SUPPOSED to be near the start but I never did find it. To survive, you’ll need to find food. Scattered around are mushrooms, blueberries, and blackberries.
That’s around where the interesting parts end. You move extremely slowly even when you turn on auto-run. This is made even worse that although this is scaled down, it is MASSIVE. So be ready to do a lot of walking. There are animals around though they seem to be somewhat few and far between. When you do spot them their movement animations are extremely stiff. Their “walking” is just sliding around the field, though their running away at least has SOME work put into it.
The pieces of “what happened here” really do feel few and far between. You can click on things in your own journal to get a shiny thing that will show you the general direction for the next one. I say “general” because I’ve been pointed to one and still didn’t end up at it. These pieces do give you excerpts of what happened, though. You’ll learn about how cities, one-by-one, became uninhabited. How they started holing themselves up in the last few remaining cities. Stuff like that.
The graphics are… interesting.. to say the least. They’ve got their charm to them, well except for the sliding animal animations, right up until you find any sort of actual structure. When I first found some structures I thought my game had glitched out due to their placement. Because the trees are basically copy-paste, they don’t really interact with the wire-frame building graphics used. It seems you can also just walk right through what should be metal beams and pieces, though some walls ARE solid. However, the building “graphics” really are kind of bad and really just make you think it’s a graphical glitch until you finally stumble upon an actual city.
Your character can get a variety of statuses. The most typical one you will see is the Rested icon, since you’ll need to rest every now and then. Doing so will also give you a small blurb to read before you wake up. There’s also hunger, which can be fixed by eating the various foods you can find (though you eat a LOT of them at once, even if the hunger icon hasn’t appeared). Injuries seem to be a bit hit or miss on when they actually happen – I jumped off a ruined highway once, no injury. Slide down a cliff though? Passed out three times and got three injuries! If you go in the water your character will get cold. And if you let anything bad happen too long, you’ll start to get close to death and eventually die.
Fear not though! Death will just send you to another random point on the map and allow you to continue from where you left off. I got to find this out through a very, very annoying way: my character got stuck on a blackberry bush and couldn’t move at all. All I could do was rest until I died from starvation. I was even able to set a campfire under me with some tinder and I didn’t catch on fire from it, despite standing on it. Huh…
Eidolon feels like a grand idea that missed the mark a bit on execution. It takes a LONG time to walk from point a to point b and half the time you don’t even know what or where point b is! The survival tools, at least for me, seemed a bit annoying to find. It took over 3 hours to even find the bow & arrow hidden in a ruined city. I still haven’t found the map.
So while the game definitely has some grand ideas, they are pretty hindered by the sheer amount of walking. I’m not really sure if I can suggest it, but it is definitely one of those try it for yourself games. The high amount of walking may appeal to some but it is definitely not for everyone.
Eidolon Review Score
2.5/5
