T w e n t y S i d e d

This game is more about stats than story, so I don’t have too much to say about the tale this game tells.

Spoilers follow. Click here to skip the spoilers and jump to my wrap-up thoughts.

---

Nice map. Remember: The shortest distance between any two points goes right through the friggin’ enemy base.

This is as much of the plot as I was able to sort out on my first-and-a-half trip through the game:

The plot centers on a gigantic gem called the “Crux of Ages”. It has magical powers, although its powers are of no direct use to you in the game. Its magic is intended to protect the king from external magical influences. A powerful Goblin wizard nicked it, which left the king open to his powers. The Goblin then proceeded to dominate the mind of the king, compelling him to launch a war with an otherwise harmless third party who live a good distance away.

The main character and his brother stole the Crux from the Goblin, but the Goblin could sort of see “through” the Crux to him. This vision wasn’t perfect. It was a very indirect sort of scrying, but it was impossible to remain hidden forever. His memories linked him to the Crux, and thus the wizard would eventually see where the protagonist had taken the Crux and what he was doing with it. As long as the main character knew where the Crux was, so would the Goblin.

THREE POUNDS? Well, that certainly limits us in where we can hide it. Ahem.

So he came up with a plan to hide the Crux and then erase his own memories. He stowed it in a safe place, left himself some clues, and then drank a potion of Plot Device. The game begins as you wake up and wonder where and who you are.

You then have to re-trace your steps, and re-claim the Crux. The erased memory created a break in continuity for the Goblin Wizard that he couldn’t follow. The upshot was that you could now safely own the Crux without him spying on you.

It was explained much better in the game. I’ve kind of butchered it by shaving it down to mere synopsis.

Once you reclaim the Crux you have to hammer your way deep into Goblin territory and confront the Goblin Wizard. There are a lot of ways this can play out, as the game gives you a number of choices.

Piss off, kid. You’re not gettin’ into the castle until you complete your assigned quests.

My major complaint is how you have to fight all the way to the heart of the Goblin fortress, kill their leader, and then use a teleport to get to the king’s castle, where you can return the Crux to its rightful place. The nearby castle is “impenetrable”, but the far-off Goblin fortress isn’t? This was too much of a stretch for me. It makes sense from a gameplay perspective, but I would have liked a better justification for storming the Goblin’s place. Considering that all you really need is to drop the Crux into its pedestal, it seems like walking up to the front gate and giving the guards a peek at the THREE POUND JEWEL OF MAGICAL AWESOME SPARKLE POWER should have been enough to get in the door. The Crux is famous, after all.

End spoilers.

---

I’m probably being unfair. Eschalon is designed to be old-school, and the old games were notoriously sloppy with justifications for doing all sorts of crazy stuff in the world. The classic “Gather up the Seven Magic Keys of Evil-Thwarting, which have been hidden for no good reason” was about par for the course back then, and Eschalon is miles ahead of that sort of thing.

I was a bit wary about the ending, since this is Echalon: Book I. I was worried we were going to get left at some wretched “buy the next game!” cliffhanger. But no, this game is self-contained and wraps things up nicely.

I had fun with the game. I’ll be looking forward to Eschalon: Book II.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.

Here we come to the nuts and bolts of character progression. This is where I’m likely to get really fussy and obsessive. If you’re one of those players who uses “auto level-up” in a game, or who hurries past the stats page to get to the more visceral parts of the experience, then this post is going to be as compelling as doing your taxes. Adjust your reading habits accordingly.

Character progression in Eschalon is fun and interesting. My biggest complaint is that the much needed in-game minimap is bound to the “cartography” skill. That is, if you don’t spend skill points on it, you don’t have a minimap. The map is pretty limited until you’ve reached about five ranks in cartography. It costs three skill points to acquire a skill, and then an additional point point for each additional rank. So, it will cost you about seven skill points to make the minimap do what you want. Considering that you only get three skill points each time you level up, this represents a major investment of points. Once you know the game you’ll discover a few ways to acquire points without sacrificing so much of your potential performance in battle, but I still dislike this idea of spending in-game skill points to make the game interface more useful. I also don’t see a need for it from a gameplay perspective: There are already lots of great skills in the game. If the minimap just worked and the cartography skill was taken away you’d never miss it.

Aside from cartography, the skills are interesting and varied. I often found myself wishing for more skill points and agonizing over tradeoffs. The points you spend at level up matter. This scarcity forces you to focus on a few core skills and forego most of the rest, or augment these lesser skills with NPC training and magical gear. I like that the system is tight and that choices feel meaningful. It pretty much demands that you give the game more than one play-through if you really want to see everything. This is as it should be.

In comparing Eschalon to other roleplaying systems, the ubiquitous D&D has six attributes that define your character. (Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma) Most other RPG’s have that many or less. Fallout was a bit of a renegade and introduced us to a deliciously complex system of seven attributes. Eschalon’s system is broader still, with an astounding eight attributes in the game: Strength, Dexterity, Endurance, Speed, Intelligence, Wisdom, Perception, and Concentration. Eight in all, and it doesn’t even include Charisma, which is good because it’s very often a complete waste in a computer RPG.

The division of Dexterity and Speed confused me at first. Most games combine these two concepts. But I can imagine cases where you’d have one but not the other. A jeweler or a locksmith might be capable of lots of fine detail work even if they have slow reflexes. A boxer might be very quick yet imprecise. The distinction makes sense, although I’m still unclear on how it works in practice. Since this is a turn-based game and everyone gets a single turn no matter how high or low their speed is, I have trouble understand exactly what the payoff is for putting points into speed.

Mental prowess is now spread out over three attributes: Intelligence, Perception, and Concentration. There’s certainly some overlap with these concepts, but I don’t mind the division if it leads to interesting gameplay and compelling character choices. My first character to go through the game was a dumb-as-a-box-of-rocks fighter who neglected or ignored all three of the mental stats. I haven’t finished my second run through the game yet. So, I don’t really feel qualified to judge on how these stats behave yet.

(You could also make the argument that Wisdom is another form of the intelligence stat, since it’s merely applied intelligence. At any rate, I’ve never been a fan of the “wisdom” stat in any game, because wisdom is a matter of behavior and therefore should be an emergent part of roleplaying. Like alignment, this should be something to guide you in playing your character, not resolve dice rolls. The way it ends up getting used in most games it should be renamed to “devotion”, “faithfulness”, or “tenacity”. The word “wisdom” implies all sorts of things to which you can’t assign a hard numerical value.)

Eschalon gives you three attribute points (different from skill points) to spend at level up. If you read the forums you’ll see lots of (usually conflicting) advice on how to best spend these. Dump them all into the stats you directly use in combat? Or spread them around and round out your character? My secret shame is that I’m a min-maxer at heart, so I can’t really comment on the usefulness of spreading the points around.

The last few posts on the game have spawned some lively discussions of strategies for character development. That says a lot about the appeal of the underlying system. I like it.

Shamus Young is a programmer, an author, and nearly a composer. He works on this site full time. If you'd like to support him, you can do so via Patreon or PayPal.