Eschalon: Book I

Since GoG keeps yelling at me to review games whenever I exit one, here we go: This game is decently fun, but made the bizarre design choice of walking at a snail's pace when it frequently wants you to backtrack for quests. There is a fast travel system, but it's mainly between towns and a few specific checkpoints, with multiple screens you need to walk through to get back to an NPC that gave you a quest an hour ago. Enemies don't respawn either, which makes the slow movement speed even more puzzling. There's also a portal spell that lets you make custom fast travel locations, but it requires heavy specialization in magic in order to set more than one or two. On the note of magic, your mana regen caps out at 1 mana every 3 turns (so every three steps/actions/wait actions taken) with spell costs far outpacing it and the growth of your maximum mana. If it efficiently cleared out groups of enemies this wouldn't be such a big deal, but instead you need multiple casts of the same spell to take out a couple of enemies. What this means is you will frequently need to rest to refill your mana after a couple of fights, during which you can be ambushed and end up repeating the cycle. There's multiple weapon types which seem to exist only to make you go "damn, I wish I picked swords", having nothing to really distinguish the three melee types apart beyond an early quest that can net you a sword that will be stronger than any other weapon you can find for a significant chunk of the game. If you can tolerate 10+ minute stretches of walking, then you can probably enjoy this game. I wonder if the later entries are better about this?

This is hard! In the best possible way. This is the type of games that I grew up on. LOVE it! Be prepared to die spectacularly and often!

Eschalon is meant to be an "old school RPG", and, I guess, it kind of is- but in all the bad ways (frustrating, unfair design decisions, unclear short-term objectives, aimlessness) rather than the good ways (memorable fictional worlds and characters, the excitement of exploration, a fair challenge). An example of a bad design decision, that cuts right to the heart of the game, is the combat system. In D&D-based combat systems, and systems derived from them, attacks usually have a 95% to-hit chance (unless they always hit), as a result of the 20-sided die used in D&D, with 1 being a critical miss. Things affecting the hit chance are then applied to the base 95% chance, so against a particularly fast enemy, you might only have a 70% hit chance, and so on. In Eschalon's combat, for whatever reason, the default hit chance is 50%, with the modifiers applied to that- so against a fast enemy, you might have a hit chance of 25%. As a result, combat generally consists of a long series of misses, both by the player and the enemy, and who wins comes down to who gets lucky enough to get several hits in a row. It is incredibly frustrating, and it's bizarre that the developers thought this was okay- it's bizarre that they didn't realize this was a bad idea, and it's bizarre that they didn't catch it in testing, and it's bizarre that they apparently didn't compare their ruleset to other games'. Another bizarre decision in Eschalon is that the automap is dependent on your character's mapping skill. At low levels of the skill, you only get to see walls; on higher levels, you eventually get to see water, grass, roads, etc. The problem with this is that you have to spend valuable skill points on the mapping skill just to be able to tell where you are on a map- and even the most cruel of old RPGs either gave you the automap free or expected you to map a series of semi-discrete locations on paper, neither of which interfere with your other skills. In all, a very bad game.

While not something to write home about, as they say, Eschalon I is a pretty nice game that was, for the most part, quite enjoyable. Despite its limitations, the most obvious being that speed can only be doubled or halved, I’m somewhat fond of this type of turn-based gameplay, there was enough to explore and do, and despite the relatively simple graphics and, for lack of a better term, structure, it was more immersive than it might seem at first glance, at least while exploring the wilderness. The music likely helps with that too. Unfortunately, character attributes are rolled, which is awfully frustrating, and then I have to point out the annoying skill system, requiring the player to read a guide first, in order to know which skills have trainers and/or books available before putting any points into them, and which may be increased by equipment before putting too many, so the limited skill points won’t be wasted. Other issues directly affecting the gameplay would be the fact that maximum regeneration is limited to one point per turn, which doesn’t seem right, and I’d say also the way movement is handled. As for lesser annoyances, I’d list the fact that selecting spells to cast can get rather tedious once you have many and the limited container space, with only eight items per container, requiring storing items in multiple places, though at least you can do so close to places you can quick travel to. I could also mention that locks and traps are a matter of reloading until you get the right roll, but that’s all right.

i like the to the point i completed more than 100 h according to gog. the only problem i see is that it's quite slow... almost too slow. every turn you can almost count the seconds per step of the character. when you need to move from one area to the other in the game you end up spending minutes just walking. quite annoying specially when you reach a point in the game where you almost clear out all enemies. except for that, a recomended game.