The Star Named EOS is a small Taiwanese production arriving this summer. Developed by Silver Lining, whose very first production this is, this narrative puzzle game has photography as its theme. The game is touching, but remains imperfect on quite a few points…
Test conditions: We completed the story of The Star Named EOS in 4 hours of play. The title was tested on PC with 32GB of RAM, an RTX 3070 and an i5-12400 (2.50 GHz).
Dei in search of his mother and her memories
The Star Named EOS has a narrative that is meant to be enigmatic to the end, and it more or less works.. You play as Dei, a young photographer searching for his memories but also for his mother, who disappeared overnight. What he has left are letters from her that he will discover throughout the game, but also souvenir photos that his mother sent him during his childhood. As you will have understood, our hero will have the objective of putting the pieces back together, in order to discover the mysterious secret of her disappearance.
Without saying too much, the story told in The Star Named EOS is a pure success. In addition to a theme of photography treated with a lot of nostalgia and philosophy, the software has here a well-rehearsed story in terms of writing, and the revelations are made step by step, until a very touching final twist.
Although the writing is well-crafted, there are unfortunately still some issues with certain elements of the narrative.. Between a mysterious protagonist who arrives like a hair in the soup and under-exploited dialogue choices, it's really a shame. Especially since the game has ideas for staging with settings that change throughout the adventure, and which manage to give us a completely different vision of the story of The Star Named EOS. However, the software will sometimes tend to fall a little too far into the easy option in certain situations.
Never mind, The artistic direction of the software is still very neat. In addition to being largely inspired by Japanese animation (more precisely Studio Ghibli), via cutscenes that give a cachet to the title, it is the environments that stand out. The paintings visited are drawn in the style of paintings, and it must be said that the design is frankly successful. Even if we could criticize a lack of diversity on the panoramas, the work provided by the studio, for which this is the first production, is rather striking.
Puzzles that are as chill as they are rewarding, with pitfalls
In its pure gameplay, The Star Named EOS plays point and click in subjective view, and with a sauce of puzzles to solve. Indeed, you will be immersed each time in different settings, in which you will have to solve puzzles and collect the objects necessary to accurately reproduce the souvenir photos of Dei's mother. It must be admitted that if the gameplay loop turns out to be repetitive with some puzzles that tend to repeat themselves a little, know that this is not necessarily the case for the puzzles which, themselves, manage to diversify.
Most of the time, since you are stationary, you will very often have to turn the camera, observe the environment in which you are, and interact with certain elements of the scenery. This can allow you to find a sheet with elements giving you clues or books, allowing you to find for example the combination of a chest. The software also goes a little further by also offering real puzzles to solve.the completion of which unlocks a mechanism and grants an item to be used at a certain location.
It remains classic in execution, even if the title stands out with the use of the camera. Recovered from the first minutes of the game, this beautiful tool that will help you take pictures as you see fit will also help with the various puzzles. There will even be a passage where its use will be crucial to reveal certain elements invisible to the naked eye. What's more, it will sometimes be the trigger for the following scenes, once you have finally taken the picture corresponding to the souvenir photo of Dei's mother.
Among the small pitfalls to note, there will however be the very succinct use of the inventory, but also the irregularity of the quality of the puzzles. Indeed, the inventory in the game is super simplistic, and is ultimately only very accessory. This could have been better worked, in the same way as the final puzzles that we found overall a little botched.
Without giving too much away once again, it is frustrating to see that the developers sometimes did not think to accentuate certain clues, so that we can quickly guess where to go or even where to click, rather than spending 5 minutes searching. In short, The Star Named EOS is sometimes brilliant in practice, but also very clumsy in certain puzzles that deserved better.
Shimmering graphics, melancholic soundtrack
Technically speaking, The Star Named EOS does an honest job for a first production from Taiwanese studio Silver Lining. As mentioned above with its solar artistic direction, the title offers a beautiful palette of colors, and a fascinating level of detail on each painting. In addition, the game has a great optimization, but also an overall graphic performance that is pleasing. Of course, this remains limited somewhere, but let's not deny ourselves our pleasure in front of its radiant design.
Finally, the soundtrack is decent without making us fall off our chairs.. Both the Japanese and English dubbing are good, and the music is relaxing. It fits quite well with the theme of each setting, although we might have expected a little more to get to our guts. This was sometimes the case, but too little for our taste.