Eschalon: Book I

Eschalon is a game of too much, and yet too little. There are too many stats & skills; and yet the world is absurdly little. Even older games gave you bigger DEMOs than all of Eschalon. There are many monsters, yet so little you can do. A massive variety of items, when you'll at most use 5. The same is said of most aspects of the game. Too many buttons, too many spells, just a massive list of redundancies to make it feel more "old school" before we collectively realized Sticks to Snakes is useless. Eschalon Book I was a bad start, and nothing really improves over the series, the UI just gets different shades lacquered onto it. The game has a lot of tools and items, and in spite of this, even after throwing my character into an editor and cranking up the numbers to absurd extremes, the character didn't feel powerful, nor did the gameplay become compelling. Even looking into the absurd number of self imposed challenges doesn't actually provide challenge, as many of them simply boil down to, "Do X and strictly X" or "Don't do X", such as "Don't Fast Travel". In a game world as small as Eschalon, this is not a challenge, this is an arbitrary restriction since the game is strictly linear. By the way, it was space aliens all along. There, I saved you three games of uncompelling gameplay.

Turn based - Check Hard as nails- Check Lots of statistics - Check Faceless hero - Check Monsters galore - Check Dying a lot - Check This is greatness in 100Megs. Just go buy it.

Book 1 and 2 were both well worth the time I put in to them. The only downside to my Eschalon experience was the long wait for book 3!

Super slow with DirectX, super fast with OpenGL, Linux version does not launch in full-screen mode, tiny 800x600 resolution... just not worth it.

NOT RECOMMENDED. The sadistic movement scheme ruins the game. It's basically a big-mapped game, where you move on a grid, exactly ONE STEP at a time, per movement command. Even if you are okay with constantly giving movement commands to get anywhere, the max speed is too slow. This most likely to keep pace with the long-and-slow battle animations. There is no keyboard movement support, most likely because it might feature more directions than the 8 of a grid. The horrible movement system alone reduces everything else to a minor nitpick in comparison. I This game is a dungeon crawler by design, except with image graphics instead of the tradiotional character ones. Speaking of graphics, a lot of it is inert decoration i.e. background variation. You cannot quickly tell what is an object and what is background i.e. not a point of interest. The character based crawlers never had problems like this because an unoccupied grid cell was marked clearly as an empty space. And they had the vital keyboard movement that is makes fast tapping possible. The same with mouse will injure your finger muscles because of the much muscle contraction required. I feel tempted to give the game my "broken game" rating of 1 star because of the missing, achetypical keyboard movement controls AND the laggy-slow game pace. Technically it boots and functions, so a begrudging "not fun to play" one of 2 stars it is. P.S. This game is like Rogue. It is literally a Rogue-like, even though NetHack would be a better example of the genre DONE RIGHT (instead of F'D UP). The full name of Rogue (1980) is "Rogue: Exploring the Dungeons of Doom." That coupled with the turn-based step-by-step movement is most likely the origin of the genre term 'dungeon crawler.' If you want to understand the origin and the implication of this forcibly-re-defined roguelike term, lookup "Berlin Interpretation." It basically tries to take the 'crawl' out of 'dungeon crawl.' Welcome to the modern day politics of ignorant rule.