Book of Eos

What can you do in one month? 4 weeks? 30 days? Probably lots of things, when you think about it. Can you make a game? And not just any game, but a JRPG? Chances are, not many of you will have said "yes" to that. But Doug Hancox, aka "TestZero", did. And it wasn't even for a game jam. It was just to challenge himself. That game was...

DEVELOPER: TestZero

PUBLISHER: TestZero

RELEASED: February 2019

RATING: n/a

AVAILABLE: Itch.io, Steam

PRICE: $2.99

I recently bought a super-mega bundle of games and software from itch.io. While browsing through it to see what would catch my interest, I saw the logo for Book of Eos, and decided to click to see what it was about. The screenshots immediately told me it was an RPG Maker game using pre-made assets which, in itself, is not necessarily bad - games like Dawn's Light, Greyfox, and So...uh...a spaceship crashed in my yard also used nothing but stock assets, but were still highly enjoyable - but it still wasn't interesting enough for me to want to download it. Then, I read further into the game's description and noticed where the dev mentioned he challenged himself to make a game in one month and Book of Eos was the result (a not-so-subtle jab at the AAA game industry also didn't hurt), and so I decided to see what he came up with.

What you did there has been seen.

As mentioned before, all the assets (apart from the title screen background) are stock RPG Maker assets - understandable, given the time crunch - but like I've always said with RPG Maker games, having nothing but stock assets isn't necessarily a sign of a bad or lazily put together game, it all comes down to what you do with those assets. The premise of the plotline is fairly straightforward: it's your basic, average, cliched RPG story, but with one twist: you play as the monsters.

The Eos Four

While scavenging through corpses left behind from a recent battle near his home, an Imp named Ozymandias ("Ozzy" for short) finds an ancient book that tells of a fabled land called Eos, a kind of Promised Land for monsterkind, where they can live without fear of human persecution. Having had his fair share of nasty looks and ill treatment, Ozzy sets out to see if such a land truly exists, and is joined by his friends Thok the Orc and Poe the Aqualing, and a fourth character named Arthur (who I won't say too much about to avoid slight spoilers). From there, the story remains pretty damn solid, with a surprising amount of character development, some excellent humor, and there are even multiple endings.

Some of the books in the game can be read to offer bits of added lore.

The rest of the game is a bit of a mixed bag, though not all of that is the game's fault, some of it's just down to my personal preferences. For instance, not a big fan of mazes, and many of the areas that aren't villages take the form of these. Now, I will admit some of the dungeons do some clever things (a certain pyramid comes to mind - let's just say be damn sure you really want to open those chests...), and although Ozzy is, for the most part, the only character you control outside of combat, there are plenty of chances for the others to utilize character-specific abilities to help you progress or find items. Still, it doesn't change the fact that you have to traverse some fairly complicated dungeon layouts to get to these parts, and I've never really had that much patience for mazes, but of course, you may feel differently.

My least favorite of all the dungeons

Same goes for the combat which, apart from boss battles, comes via random encounters. Personally, I've never really liked them, as I feel they take a bit of control away from the player by not allowing you to progress through the game at your own pace. My opinions aren't helped by a problem more specific to Book of Eos, that being the combat difficulty is a bit scattershot, to the point where there's not so much a difficulty curve as a difficulty squiggle. Case-in-point: slimes, what should be one of the easiest enemy types to beat in any RPG, yet early on within the first few minutes of the game I decided to run from any battle involving them simply to avoid the headache, as they can regenerate 30+ HP at a time while you're only slapping them for low single digits, assuming they don't evade your attacks.

Slimes - the most powerful of all RPG enemies...wait, what??

Overall, it's not a bad little game, with a decent amount of content - roughly 10 hours, possibly more depending on how much combat you take part in and how many of the endings you go after. Sure, it's got its problems, but what game doesn't? And while there were a couple of genuine concerns, like the map design and the difficulty level, many of the problems can be put down to limitations with RPG Maker or, again, personal preferences.

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