評論

• gamedeal user

  Jul 18, 2015

  What you get out of Eidolon depends heavily on what you put into it. It doesn't present you with any formalised tasks or goals, which I assume accounts for the mixed reviews, but if you're prepared to explore a large environment and piece together the story of what happened there from scattered texts, Eidolon is rewarding and fascinating. The survival elements are rudimentary enough that they don't make up the majority of what you're doing (And I feel like they are there more because of expectation than because they are integral to the design), and leave you mostly to explore and find your way around. I get that this is not what everyone wants from a game, but I got a lot out of it. It helps that it's often stunning to look at, too.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 4, 2014

  This is the first time I decide to write a review, and the reason is quite simple: Eidolon is a masterpiece. You will walk in endless landscapes tracking the tales of the ones who once dwelled in this land. The "story-writing" is incredibly compelling, and you'll find yourself totally immersed journeying in this post human and beautifully rendered new world. The survival elements of the game are unobtrusive but deadly ready to punish the inexperienced traveller, you'll have a bow, a fishing rod, binoculars, a compass and no idea of where you are or where to go. You'll be lost, and happy to be lost. Eventually you'll start to find pieces of map, pieces of stories, pieces of humanity... Eidolon is a battue in which you'll hunt down the lives of those who are long forgotten, Eidolon is a struggle to survival, Eidolon is a deep inner journey. May you discover yourself, at the end of this path.
• gamedeal user

  Dec 2, 2015

  This game has good atmosphere and an interesting story. I really, really tried to like it, but at the end, there isn't a lot to do, the mechanics are not great and doesn't feel like a finished product.
• gamedeal user

  Nov 2, 2014

  “It’s a great, well written survival game”, I was told by someone trying to get attention towards the title. This isn’t a survival game. It has survival elements, but the general mood of the game isn’t survival. What Eidolon is though, is a walking simulator pushed to the extremes. You begin in the woods with nothing, and you just start… Walking. And walking. And walking. Until you see a cube, it’ll either be green or white. If it’s white, you get a tool to aid your survival. If it’s green, you will get a page or two to various stories that are scattered across the vast landscape. The tools add up, but you’re not spending most of your time working to survive, or even thinking about it. Food is plenty and it takes a rather long fall to injure yourself, and if you do, you’ll still heal over time. Animals are scared of you and I’m never witnessed an attack on my 4 hour playthrough. What you will be doing, is walking. And walking. And walking. And hopefully you’ll come across another cube. Now, the green cubes seem to be the purpose of the game. The stories they hold are really well written, some are captivating while others depressing and melancholic. From brain damaged cultists to people just trying to survive whatever happened, the stories draw you in and makes you want to read more. Now, you can find tags under said bits of stories to generate a green spectre that will point you to the next part of the story, but that’s about it in what the game tells the player to do. And even though it will point you in the right direction, they never indicate how long the trek is, and they can be long. Super long. It’s vastness may be the biggest thing I have against it. Now the idea of exploring a vast landscape is a great one, I grew up on a farm that owned 100 acres of forest, most of my childhood was spent exploring these woods, discovering things that resided in it. But Ice Water games have stretched themselves a bit thing to make this landscape so vast. I can dig a simple art style, but it’s concern about the big things result in a lack of detail in the little things. Flat surfaces and large, tall trees make up so much of the land and it’s lack of threat results in being unable to “believe” these woods. Although everything is not all like that. Once you find the desolate highway and blown out buildings, the game picks up a bit. The density of story cubes increases and the landscape gets interesting as you traverse through these ruins of modern civilization. I also should mention the music, the music is great. It sets the tone better than the artwork, from rustic acoustic guitars to roaring electronics, they tremendously help add the mood to your journey and the stories you find within. So overall, it can be a interesting experience. But it can also be a monotonous one. Don’t get into the story expecting the game to immediately point you to what you need to do. The stories you’ll read are great, and some will even motivate you to trek miles for the next piece. But the game could have really benefited from being less vast and instead try to be a little more dense. 6/10
• gamedeal user

  Jun 3, 2017

  while the reviews do state plainly that this is a walking simulator I assumed that like everyone on the internet they where just too stuffy to appreciate a good experience and so I bought it anyway to try it out myself but what the reviews forget to mention is that this game was made with absolutely no thought to mechanics, art-style or world building, feeling completely unfinished and not even reaching close the standards of what a real experience should be. This "game" was made in the unreal engine by a team obviously well versed in this engine as every game they have published so far has been inside of it so this must have been their first game because the lack of ingenuity in the approach really show, the lazy, and generic polygonal art-style coupled with the underdeveloped "survival Mechanics" that literally amount to collect item, click into the horrible interface, and keep walking with no real feel of any consequence all feel like undeveloped concepts in what turns out to be a generic, uninspired bag of garbage that thinks that good sound design and well written albiet small snippets of story that lead nowhere makes it "artistic" and thats the worst part, this is a good game conceptually, you get dropped in a post-apocalypse world where the only clues of what happened are snippets of peoples lives, conceptually this could have been the minecraft meets the last of us game developers have been trying to make for ages but nothing in this open world feels finished or even looks finished, its all just an empty sandbox with really boring survival mechanics and little note's that could have built upon one-another into what could have been a real story but end up just being random storys that are as long as they are meaningful and trust me they are very short story's and I had to pay fifteen bucks to learn all of that because none of these reviews properly spelled it out for me, so while I can't get that hour of my life back i can at least tell you to stay the hell away and not waste your money or time like I did
• gamedeal user

  Aug 11, 2014

  How did I end up spending more than twenty hours in a walking simulator? I guess a large part of it can be attributed to the mystery. Eidolon is a game that doesn't spoon-feed you anything at all. You're dropped into the massive forests modeled after Western Washington, USA, with no equipment or directions of any kind. Soon enough you'll find some rudimentary survival gear and some documents left behind by people that came before. These documents, which range from personal letters to posters and diaries, detail the happenings of the area spanning an era of hundreds of years. And that's basically Eidolon - One document leads to another, that one to yet another, or maybe to a completely different story strand. There are about twenty different stories containing well more than a hundred pages total to find, all adding their distinctive perspective to the overall picture. How much of it will be uncovered is left to the player - as far as I can gather, Eidolon doesn't really reach any kind of a conclusion, even though all of the individual stories eventually will. Without revealing too much, Eidolon deals with subjects like posthumanism, transhumanism, mortality and what it means to be a human in the first place. The stories are well written and quite thought-provoking, as they should be, since they're the sole force propelling the player forwards through the vast stretches of wilderness. Eidolon requires a rare kind of patience. "Vast" only begins to describe the distances required to be crossed in search for the next scrap of history. It isn't just that the play area is absolutely huge, it's the lack of reliable maps and the presence of large, uncrossable bodies of water that will frequently require you to take the long way around and sometimes even backtrack several hours worth of wandering. Whether it's all worth it depends on the player. There's really not much actual gameplay in Eidolon - you need to occasionally forage, fish & hunt to keep yourself nourished, but the game isn't actively out to get you unless you get foolhardy. I found myself doing a lot of thinking and soul-searching while trekking, pondering about more than just the lives of the people on the paper. Eidolon evokes a profound sense of isolation, loneliness and melancholy that lingers. The game's atmosphere is further cemented by the excellent post-rock/ambient soundtrack that I count among the very best in gaming. Graphics are extremely simplified and minimalist yet frequently beautiful, unless you look at things up close. Technically the game does have some problems, ranging from flickering polygons and hitches while loading terrain to more serious issues like getting stuck and falling through the world geometry. Despite these issues, I found the narrative strong enough to keep on exploring. It's clear that Eidolon is a product of a singular vision with no input from focus groups or marketing forces. It demands a lot of your time - maybe too much for most - but for people like me with too much time on their hands anyway and a penchant for self-reflection, Eidolon can prove to be a very fulfilling experience. One of my favorite games of 2014.
• gamedeal user

  Aug 6, 2014

  Quiet, lonely and hauntingly beautiful.
• gamedeal user

  Sep 4, 2015

  Eidolon is the sort of game you'll either love or hate. You'll love it if you enjoy a variety of interesting storylines, lore and exploration over a massive world that you can relax in, with a beautiful soundtrack to boot, or you'll hate it as one of those "Walking simulators" with not much to do and survival elements that are weak, if I'm being honest. It's a good game that could have been made better with more raw gameplay, perhaps being able to scavenge things from the ruins like sheet metal to build shelters and a temperature system so that you could keep warm at night. The notes that you find scaterred throughout the world are the most interesting part to this game, with some dating back centuries and telling the story of what happened to bring you the world that you see now. I'll say this; the story is not what you'd expect and is full of surprises that I'm still discovering, and it's quite deep at times as are some of the characters in them. The notes are spotted as floating green orbs that you walk up to, and you can find more by following the bird that flies above you or clicking on a story piece in your journal and following the green light from that. I would have liked them to be found through searching drawers or in the boots of cars, though I understand why it's done this way. Some of them are hard to read though, so a more 'plain text' version that you could have switched to would've helped. There's also a journal that you can write in and keep track of things, which is a very nice touch. There are tools in the game as well, things like fishing poles and binoculars, although you only find them as floating white orbs, which is one of the things that could have been done better with crafting or scavenging. The graphics are very... minimalist, and they actually grew on me. When I bought the game, I did worry about the graphics not being too detailed, but like minecraft's graphics they actually work for the game, though I can still imagine the world being real. Perhaps all too real at times. Standing atop a tall hill and overlooking the rolling forests and ruined cities is actually quite incredible if you find the right place, and the music completes it. The only thing I don't like about it are the animals; they look a little bit derpy at times. The soundtrack; oh dear, where to begin? There are dozens and dozens of tracks in the game, all of them suited to different places, there's a theme and ambient version for each place and one track for day and night. Some are quite melancholic and others are strangely upbeat or tribal, even sci-fi sounding at times. It's all very ambient and there are no combat tracks or anything too fast paced. They work for the game fantastically and I'd recommend buying the soundtrack for yourselves off of Bandcamp if you like Ambient, or perhaps Wilderness Ambient? I think having more dangerous animals scattered about would have been nice, I'm not sure why there aren't bears or wolves living in the ruins. Just something to make the game feel more 'alive', like it really is all abandoned and nature is reclaiming it. Overall, Eidolon is a game I would recommend if you don't mind walking long distances to collect more pieces of the story and if you enjoy lots of story and lore, as well as plenty of deep thinking and wonderful music. If you're looking for a survival game like The Long Dark, this is not it, nor is it a combat focused game. The only game that comes to mind as being similar is Dear Esther, although the two are still different. A good game that could have been a lot more, but it's got just enough to keep me going and has been one of the most inspiring games I've played in my life, hands down.
• gamedeal user

  Jun 15, 2021

  Do you know that feeling? The bittersweet realisation that you will never be able to experience something for the first time. I'm sure you have played games or watched movies that evoke this feeling in you. For me, Eidolon does that. And it's so strong, it almost makes my throat clamp up. Someone wrote in another review that your enjoyment of Eidolon is dependent on how much you're willing to 'give' it. And that's a very good way of putting it. Let me explain. At its surface, Eidolon is an extreme open-world walking simulator with some light survival elements, and lots of 'story pieces' to collect over the entire area. That might not sound very interesting, but the devil is in the details - or rather in the execution. To keep it short: - the world is, while quite low-poly, incredibly immersive. Great soundscape, music, and a strange map system (the only map you get is what you can scavenge, and its up to you to find out your location there - no GPS) truly make you feel like you're there, in post-human Washington. - the story pieces are not only gripping, but also incredibly well written. We're talking about 400 years of history. Multiple eras, events, different kinds of people. There are so many stories here. So many people were here before you. - the notebook. The game lets you keep your own diary. If it sounds minor, trust me; this is like 40% of the game's enjoyment factor. You can write your own story, try to interpret the things you find there, whatever you wish. Oh, and you can write while walking, and there's autowalk. - the simplicity and yet ingenuity of the gameplay. You forage, you fish, you hunt, you sleep. It's very simple, but adds an incredibly immersive factor to the game. Food spoils, so you gotta keep foraging. It's so joyful to find a grove of berries, knowing that there's more here than you can possibly carry. I never found it too difficult to find food, although you do have to constantly be on the lookout. - the music. It's... well, it's really, really good. Too bad I can't listen to it anymore, it causes that unpleasant feeling, as it makes me remember the months I spent in the wilderness. (took me around 4 months in-game to collect every single story piece) Oh, and the game never gives you any objectives. Ever. You're truly free. You can decide yourself when you're done with the game. There's no boss, no ending, it's just you, wilderness, and thoughts of those who came before. Eidolon is very, very much not for everyone. No objectives, no map (as in no GPS), no fast travel. Many things we take for granted, and would feel lost without. But if you can handle it, then please, try it. Maybe you'll love it forever like I do. Or maybe you won't. I dare say this review should give you a good idea whether the game is for you or not.
• gamedeal user

  Jan 5, 2015

  Awesome game if you're into slow-paced, open-ended exploration of a huge world with some very basic, relatively low-pressure survival mechanics. Everything about that is right up my alley, so this is probably the best game purchase I've made in the past year. I can understand how the gameplay style might bore or frustrate some players; and while the survival aspect is less than frantic, if you make a wrong move or two, it can also be brutally unforgiving. Eidolon is a relaxed game and has been described pretty aptly as a "walking simulator." You simply roam the vast landscape (really vast) seeking to piece together the story of what happened to the people who once lived in the area in an apocalyptic scenario and its aftermath. You can follow specific story lines from one clue to the next as you discover them, or you can just explore freestyle. The graphics are minimalist, but in my opinion they are gorgeous and beautifully successful at evoking the character of the Pacific Northwest. I rarely find myself being critical of the graphics. This is good for people playing on less-than-beefy computers, as the game isn't terribly taxing on resources. Staying alive in Eidolon is just a matter of eating enough and avoiding sickness or injury. There is really no crafting to speak of, and no building. Mushrooms, berries, and fish (after you cook it) are your staples; it's also possible to hunt for meat if you find a bow and arrow, but this is really difficult and I've only had one successful kill after a lot of trying. You can collect tinder to build campfires. Wounds from fall damage and aggressive animals (wolves, bears) are the main sources of injury, and eating spoiled food or freezing are the main ways in which you can be injuried, as well as from wounds which fester. You *don't* want to get sick from a wound -- the situation can get really dire quite fast. I've only found one bizarre bug in several hours of gameplay, and that was a deer that got stuck in the side of a hill at the very beginning of my game and couldn't seem to get out. The animal AI behavior is a little "blocky" and unnatural, but I didn't find this to be a serious problem since interaction with animals is pretty rare on the whole. Things I love about Eidolon: - Sparse graphic style and massive open world work well together in this particular context - The documents and maps that you find are beautifully designed and rendered - The writing with respect to the characters and their stories is excellent, some of the best I've seen in a game - Soundtrack and audio are atmospheric and appropriate to the game - The survival mechanics are not unnecessarily cerebral and convoluted just for the sake of being fancy, and are fairly realistic, e.g., it's a low-key piece of cake until something awful happens and then you're f****d. Improvements I would suggest: - A slightly (not greatly) more involved system for hunting and fishing. As-is, it's so basic and easy as to be unrewarding, particularly the fishing. - The graphics for manmade structures are not up to par with the graphics for natural flora and fauna; the discrepancy is pretty damn glaring at times. - A more nuanced system for moving from one story clue to the next. The clairvoyant "Now that I've seen this, I magically know to go *this* way" thing is a cop-out; a little more intensive writing and design centered around the maps and documents themselves would be more realistic and engaging. This was the only aspect of the game that broke my sense of immersion. - Some reviewers have suggested that the game needs more density of interactivity overall; while I agree that this wouldn't hurt, the sparseness and slow pace are part of the game's basic aesthetic and I wouldn't want to see that sacrificed for the sake of giving bored people "more to do." So maybe a few more interaction possibilities, but just a few. - I also think this game could benefit from a slightly more involved cooking system, such as the ability to make a few different basic campfire recipes with different special properties or bonuses for the player (cold resistance, movement speed bonus, healing bonus, that sort of thing). In short: one of the best games of its kind, and an awesome experience if you're into the genre and don't require a constant life-and-death struggle or lots of shiny, flashy things to keep you involved in a game. Kudos to the producers of Eidolon!