We’ve played our fair share of puzzle adventure games. Some were more adventure-based, and others more on the puzzling side. Not many developers are able to inject just the right amount of each to form a game that has both a compelling narrative and puzzles that are challenging but not impossible to solve.
We got the chance to play a story-driven puzzle adventure in the form of The Star Named EOS. Will this game manage to get the mix just right?
The Star Named EOS is a narrative-based puzzle game based around photography. You play as Dei, a young man whose love of photography was inspired by his mother, who is now absent from his life. When Dei was a child his mother would travel and send him letters including a photograph from where she was. It is now your task to follow in her footsteps, in an attempt to find out what happened to her, by travelling to these locations and recreating her photographs.
The game is split up into ten chapters, and broadly speaking, each chapter contains a different location, including Dei’s childhood bedroom, a cafe and a campsite. Most of the chapters start off by reading your mother’s letter and studying the photograph she sent. It is then a case of looking around your environment in order to gather the materials you will need to recreate the photograph as best you can.
Your position will be fixed so you won’t be able to move around the location but can look around 360-degrees by moving the right thumbstick. You also have a cursor that is controlled by the left thumbstick and can select items using the A button, which allows you to interact with them. In some cases this will allow you to zoom into an object, or group of objects, so you can see them more clearly and interact with them further. You also have an inventory, which can be accessed using Y.
The world of The Star Named EOS is hand-drawn and reminds us of our favourite anime childhood animations. This was reinforced when watching the occasional animated cut-scene in the game. The background music is cheerful and unobtrusive but we highly recommend wearing headphones to immerse yourself in the 360-degree soundscape at certain points in the game. For example, if someone is standing on your right and talking then the sound of their voice will change in location and loudness as you look around – a simple touch but something that we really appreciated. The location in each chapter is full of interesting objects to look at and interact with and exploring each one was a joy. That leads us onto the puzzles.
Your route through each chapter is linear, so you need to solve one puzzle before moving onto another. The puzzles are quite easy to find, simply by looking around the room and interacting with everything you see. For example, you might see a cupboard with a sliding puzzle on it. On solving, it will open to reveal a code for another locked object. The puzzles are all pitched at a good level of difficulty with the ones in the earlier chapters simpler than subsequent ones but because you get more experienced in the types of puzzles on offer this is a clever way of ensuring things don’t get too easy later on.
One reason why the game is not too challenging is because most of the puzzles will be familiar to anyone who has ever played a puzzle game before, with classics such as sliding puzzles, code breaking, jigsaws and mazes. It’s not all familiar though as recreating the photographs is a type of puzzle that we have never seen before. You will have to locate a background that is similar to your mother’s photo and find objects to place in front of each to best match it before taking the shot with your camera. On doing so, that chapter is complete and you can move onto the next location.
As you move through, the narrative behind the game slowly unfolds and you discover more about Dei and his Mother’s long-forgotten back story. We don’t want to ruin any enjoyment of the game as there are a few surprises along the way but you can expect an emotional story.
This narrative is carried along by reading the letters from Dei’s mother, and watching the animated cut-scenes, in which there is voice acting. The rest of the time you might get the odd written sentence from Dei as you explore objects, with many of these (at least in the earlier levels) acting as clues. In terms of other hints – there aren’t any. In many puzzle games you will find a hint section, which can help if you are stuck but for whatever reason the developers behind The Star Named Eos decided not to include one. However, we didn’t feel the need for any hints and if we ever did get stuck it was simply because we missed interacting with an object in the room.
The Star Named EOS is a short game, lasting a few hours, and this feels like the right amount of time. At the end of the game the plotline was resolved and many puzzles had been solved. That is not to say that we wouldn’t have enjoyed spending a little longer in the game.
As for our earlier pondering, The Star Named EOS certainly has a great mix of puzzles. It is, however, lacking a little on the ‘adventure’ front, due to your fixed location within each environment and the narrative was not all that compelling. However, we appreciated the fact that this game was kept simple, unlike many puzzlers we’ve played in the past. We liked the linear gameplay so it was easy to figure out what to do next; didn’t miss having to move around a giant map and get lost, felt calmed by the lack of characters to interact with (only to skip through endless dialogue) and were engaged by the familiar yet innovative puzzles.Â
If you are looking for a short, but sweet, puzzle game then The Star Named EOS comes highly recommended.
