Eidolon demands patience from its audience. The glacial pace of its most basic operation, the fragmented mass of narrative provisions, and the initial sense of indistinguishable aesthetic diversity seem intent on wrecking Eidolon’s sprawling sense of discovery. Sticking with it inevitably reveals a multifaceted excursion into an intimately assembled and oddly exotic interpretation of a distant Earth. The reward is putting it all together, provided you can summon the drive to find all the pieces.
Taking place in a future void of humanity, Eidolon isn’t so much post-apocalyptic as it is (in the words of its creators) post-human. The world 400 years from now, or at the very least the forests of the Pacific Northwest, are absent of human activity. In a game with a physical, ready-to-explore world the size of Eidolon’s, I can’t issue absolutes, but it is a damn lonely place to scour and devour. Occasionally you’ll stumble upon a fox, a bear, or a giant cloud of insects, but Eidolon is ultimately composed of the present world – along with hints, both vague and visible, of the way it used to be.
Running, walking, and jumping comprise Eidolon’s limited means of interaction. The game places value on both exploration and pure survival, though it handles the former with considerably more interest and talent than the latter. Eidolon is a game about piecing together a scattershot narrative and absorbing the surrounding world in the process. Keeping yourself alive and healthy supports certain aspects of its story, but its function is to monitor active interest and keep the player engaged.
Survival is an odd juxtaposition because it doesn’t feel valuable to Eidolon’s mission. It’s time consuming – collecting mushrooms and berries or catching fish with the easy-to-find fishing pole is necessary at least once in its twenty minute day – but survival doesn’t drive an active interest in playing the game. It’s also of no reasonable consequence, as dying results in inevitable resurrection at certain points throughout the land; the only penalty is time. Mortality and the nature of human advancement are major themes packed inside Eidolon’s narrative, but the mechanics of survival seemed incidental to Eidolon’s greater experience.
The first thirty minutes of Eidolon should present a fairly universal path to walk. You come to terms with its mechanics and begin to explore the vast open world ahead. A bit of exploration reveals a helping of inventory items to aid your quest; I found a fishing pole, a compass, a bow and, much later, binoculars. Of greater interest are the floating green spheres, each of which reveals a hand-written letter, map, e-mail, drawing, diary, speech notes, or a myriad of other fragments of lost human correspondence.
In my first hours with Eidolon, I didn’t have much interest seeking out its sporadically placed collection of notes. Ahead of me was an incredibly huge open world, one explicitly designed by the hands of its creators. I don’t typically have a problem with procedurally generated worlds, but I like knowing, especially in an exploration-focused game, everything out there is constructed with an intimate purpose in mind. Given the titanic expanse of Eidolon’s world, what kind of wonders could be waiting for me out there?
That particular question drove my first five hours with Eidolon. Its stylized (low fidelity, but clean and absorbing) version of the Pacific Northwest was automatically intriguing. I live in Kentucky, and exploring terrain widely divergent from my everyday routine was incentive enough to poke around its edges. Mountains on the horizon were instant destinations, and encountering decaying man-made objects on the way there built Eidolon’s narrative in my mind. Along the way I found shattered remnants of highways, towering wire-frame reminders of fallen cities, and small white piles of rubble I could only assume were the bones of those who came before me. I collected notes where I found them, but they didn’t seem to be tying together in any appreciable fashion.
Somewhere around the ten hour mark, my time with Eidolon started to fall apart. I had made it to one of the northern mountains and found myself welcomed by snow and freezing cold. I had collected enough tinder to constantly build fires, meaning I would venture away and make it as far north as I could before nearly freezing to death and building another fire. Eventually, after what felt like an hour, I made it to the edge of Eidolon’s world and found…nothing. There wasn’t anything there, even after trekking down either side of the coastline. I don’t know what I expected, but it certainly wasn’t a long hike back to temperate forests.
At that point I thought my time with Eidolon was over. I felt that it had a visual vocabulary that couldn’t support the imagination of the world it presented. I enjoyed exploring, but at a certain point I needed more structure to support continued interest. I could only sit and stare at the stars for so long before I just wanted to sleep forever. In the interest of writing a diligent review I started poking around in Eidolon’s menus and discovered keywords at the end of each collected note. Clicking a keyword shot out a green marker, and following that marker lead to another note adding to that particular part of Eidolon’s story. This changed everything.
Eidolon’s sprawling series of notes provide the perfect complement to the staggering expanse and isolation of its world. Written by several different authors and covering the 400 years of time since the present, these notes are an enormous collection of interconnected stories that build into a generation-spanning narrative. Most of the notes even have a connection to the precise spot they’re found in, relaying a specific event that happened in that same place at a different time. The closest analog that comes to mind is David Mitchell’s novel Cloud Atlas which follows several different characters across significantly different periods in human history. Eidolon takes that basic framework and applies it to interactive discovery.
A line through Eidolon’s narrative eventually presented itself. Without explicitly stating its finer details, most of the notes describe mankind’s accent into a higher calling and how society and culture dealt with the inevitable fallout. Some of its branches are call to specific archetypes – doomsday cults, simple folks who wish to live in isolated communities – but most are original takes reacting to the vague technology that changed human culture forever. The early tragedy, volatile aftermath, and subdued post-script present intriguing narrative threads, and every piece of information seems to add something personal to its authors and important to its world. Even the ambiguous poetry that pops up every time you sleep aches to tie into Eidolon’s greater message.
The amount and variety of material comprising Eidolon’s notes is every bit as massive and purposely constructed as its physical world. Again, few (like the cultists) are a little on-the-nose, but most are written with the subtlety and restraint necessary to relay a message without giving it all away. And there are so many characters and stories locked inside these notes. Eventually I figured out that the bird that always seemed to be overhead would lead me to the closest available note, and at fifteen hours into the game I was still uncovering brand new keywords and previously unspun narrative threads.
After roaming the lands on my own for ten or so hours, I thought I had Eidolon’s vast lands covered. Following the bird around unveiled areas and environments I had never seen. From elusive hints of the fallen supernatural to swampy wild lands to indiscriminately glowing green valleys, Eidolon’s world has plenty to offer – even for someone who assumed to have already seen it all. In lieu of the lukewarm survival mechanics, Eidolon’s note-collection compulsion served as a proper driver for the back half of my enjoyment with the game. After collecting maybe a dozen over the first ten hours, I spent the next ten collecting and absorbing over eighty of them – and there’s still more out there waiting for me.
With all of that in mind, Eidolon isn’t recommended without a few qualifications. I found its deliberate lack of instruction to be a draw but, at the same time, it almost killed my enjoyment of the game. Along the same lines, your character’s literal pace is often unbearably slow – especially after you start to get tired and running becomes disabled. I get why, you’re intended to stop and smell the roses, but after I certain point I started getting bored looking at the same environments. Visually, Eidolon makes room for the fantastic and the mundane; there just might be too much room between the two.
Above all else, Eidolon demands patience from its audience. Patience to absorb its world. Patience to find and piece together its narrative. Patience to physically move from place to place. Patience to oblige its survival mechanics. In may not have the wild imagination of Proteus or the sublime intensity of Dear Esther, but its thoughtfully constructed story and colossal world make for an experience willfully divergent from any of its peers. It’s all out there waiting to be devoured by whoever stumbles upon it – provided you can find the drive to make it come together.
