Eschalon: Book I

The Good
The best moments of playing this game were the first: Your character creation screen lets you customize every part of the character - you can add up to almost twenty different skills, manage eight attributes and even choose your hero's religious outlook. While dice-based attribute allocation can be annoying, there is a certain nostalgia value to this feature that throws me back to the days of Baldur's Gate. In fact, there are quite a few points of resemblance between this game and the old Black Isle games, because the isometric view and the multiple skill selection brought to my mind the first Fallout games. The many reviews that called this a "return to classical RPG" raised my expectations further...

...only to have them fall, crushing down, on the jugged rocks of reality.

If it weren't for the indie community hype, I would have been slightly more generous to this game: It has decent graphics, a fairly large world to explore with dungeons, forests and deserts, a small (but good) selection of magical equipment and (unlike any classical RPG) I didn't experience any bugs. The game has traps and puzzles, and although they are fairly simplistic they add quite a bit to the gameplay, especially if you wish to play in iron-man style (no reloading, if you die you restart). The same goes for randomized items (almost all drops and almost all chests and containers are random), which could make any two gameplays fairly different. On the other hand, you could abuse the reload feature and get the best possible items for your level (shops, drops and chests are mostly level dependent) to become a juggernaut of destruction.

The Bad
None of the above, however, make this game any less boring.

The game has a childish plot with exactly one twist that you'll see coming a mile away. It has only three towns, very few side-quests and barely a handful of NPCs, and even they serve only as shops/trainers/healers. Your character has no personality of his own (and he's always a "he", choosing a gender is enabled in the next game - yes, they needed an extra game to implement that feature) - all the background choices you made at the start of the game serve only to give you some bonuses. All your interactions with NPCs (the few that you manage to find, that is) are limited to either accepting their quest and doing exactly as you're told or killing everyone and everything. In the world of Eschalon subtlety and multi-choiced approaches are non existent. Even after playing through the game and reading all it's books of lore (not that difficult as there are about five books that expand your knowledge of the game world, while all other books are either alchemy tomes or stat increases) I still know precious little about that world, nor do I care for any of its inhabitants. When all of your NPCs are either quest or item dispensers (with the exception of the inhabitants of the first town that at least try to educate you about the going-on in the world) there is nothing to immerse you in the game. Classical RPGs were classical because they had memorable characters - from cynical druids to flouting skulls, but Eschalon only has shop-boys and quest-girls.

The combat aspect doesn't compensate for the lack of a plot: While you can invest in many skills, in the end you will either be a sword/bow fighter (with a bit of casting) or an elementalist/divine caster. Both serve equally well because all enemies are practically the same melee opponent but with different stats. The game has only four non-melee monster types: one short-range spitter, one long-range archer, one long-range magical beast (that shoots magic beams instead of arrows) and one suicide bomber. Notice the lack of spell-casting foes - the game just couldn't be bothered to engineer an interesting confrontation.

You could have forgiven the poor opponent selection if the melee fights were any good, but they aren't. The game's turn system is completely unbalanced because any action - be it shooting or casting or hitting in melee - takes exactly one turn. This means that if in any moment the fight turns against you could simply bid your enemies farewell and march to the nearest exit, and they won't be able to do anything but follow you at a distance of exactly one square (or more, because some monster are slower than you, or the AI chooses a bad route). When you reach the exist to a safe area you can heal at your leisure (by walking to and fro until mana and/or health recharges because sleeping spawns more monsters) and then return to the previous area to kill some more. Even when the game forces you to stay and fight by closing your escape routes or flinging ranged opponents at you, you can still outmaneuver them with creative walking. Yes, "creative walking". It is as exciting as it sounds.

The game even ends (SPOILERS! ...of a sort) with insert-ending-here. When you reach the very end of the game you could either choose one dialog option and no fight to have one ending or choose another dialog option and a fight for a different ending. Thus lazily ending a lazy story. As long as you kill main baddie number so-and-so all your actions are excused and you can choose to be the great savior or the great traitor regardless of what happened so far.

The Bottom Line
If this game was trying to recreate the experience of classical RPGs it failed miserably. Even if it didn't, it's still a failure. Technically tolerable, but boring and unimaginative. If you want a good indie RPG you could check out Spiderweb games, but stay away from this game.