Eleusis – Review (PC)

Eleusis – Review (PC)

Eleusis is a first person 3D adventure game set in a perpetually dark fictional village in Greece. Utilising Ancient Greek mythology as a foundation for its tale, it places you at the centre of peculiar occult happenings and disappearances in the locality, tasking you with solving a sinister mystery plot. But can it compete with the games it so obviously imitates and carve a place for itself in an increasingly crowded sub-genre?

Amnesia. Slender. Penumbra. These are considered to be leading examples in the recent wave of survival horror/adventure games that have hit our digital game stores. Choosing to strip the player of any physical advantage or sense of empowerment – thus leaving them vulnerable and cowering in the dark with an underpowered flashlight – they are a revisionist take on the adventure game genre. Encountering enemies is no longer a choice of fight or flight; it’s run or die, and it’s proven to be phenomenally popular and utterly terrifying.

Eleusis clearly aspires to follow in the footsteps of these games. Developed by a team of three with the Unreal Developer’s Kit, it’s very much an ‘indie’ title, having gained a more widespread release through Steam’s Greenlight programme.

As the story begins, we are greeted by an ominous dose of voiceover exposition before things begin to go horribly wrong. Our protagonist is stranded on a dark dirt road with nothing but a torch to guide him along narrow winding paths through thick foliage. The moon is shrouded in fog and a gentle wind rustles through falling autumnal leaves. A wolf howls in the distance as we move past a clearing towards an empty village, and then the battery on the torch flickers out, alerting us that we need to locate another source of illumination. I take an instinctive glance behind me to make sure nothing unexpected is approaching from my flank. At this point, it feels as though the game is preparing to catch me off guard, and I am genuinely full of nervous anticipation.

It’s moments like these where Eleusis shines.

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Was sure I left a key around here somewhere…

As you’re pushing forward into unknown territory and you’re trying to make out shapes as they materialise out of the fog, it’s positively atmospheric. I begin to wonder whether this fearful anticipation is due to expectations ingrained in my gaming consciousness by other titles like Slender, but I’ll give Eleusis the benefit of the doubt. There’s nothing revolutionary in its methods of tension building, but it states its intentions clearly from the start, and in its finest moments, it’s genuinely quite unnerving.

And it’s surprisingly good looking aswell – perhaps one of the finest looking indie games I’ve played. The extremely versatile Unreal engine has been used to great effect. Shafts of dynamic moonlight penetrate through the fog as you step through the woodland, and falling leaves drift by on the breeze. The lighting is nicely implemented, conjuring a consistent, realistic mood. Foliage even reacts to you moving through it, and the overall level of detail exceeded my expectations.

The physics extend to objects aswell, such as rocks, logs and buckets. You can levitate them in midair with your invisible hand cursor, and hurl them off in any direction. Again, this is nothing new, but it’s nice to find an additional level of interaction that a number of comparable games do not have. It’s a shame though that this physical object interaction isn’t utilised for anything of note at any point in the game. All quest objects are usable via a traditional inventory system, so the physics interaction becomes nothing more than a toy for launching logs around until you become bored with it.

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Wolf attack

As far as the story is concerned, it’s a fairly unambitious tale, and this is where all of that carefully mounted tension is wasted. As the second chapter of the game begins, your main task is locating a missing woman whom you promised to help, despite knowing almost nothing about her. The map opens up significantly, and you’re free to push forward into the unknown, picking up story quests as you go. Some of the missions are quite varied and give a good sense of progress and achievement. But the quests soon devolve into simple fetch, carry and find affairs. The majority of the time, you’re picking up keys and looking for vaguely described doors on vaguely identical buildings with little sense of progression towards an overall objective. There is no hint system or map in place, so you’ll be relying purely on your memory of the village layout to locate your objectives. As mentioned, the atmosphere and tension is most effective when you’re delving into and exploring new locations. But by the time you find the door you were looking for, you will have tried your key in just about every other location on the map, and therefore will have seen pretty much everything there is to see. As far as maintaining tension goes, this is a really bad design decision, and just lazy in terms of mission variety. For a game that features such a prominently eerie atmosphere, it gives up its bag of tricks pretty quickly, and it feels like a wasted opportunity. Atleast with something like Slender, they overcame this problem by implementing levels with randomly spawning objectives to add that extra re-playability. And with Amnesia, a sense of forward progress is always maintained, and there is a constant sense of impending dread. With Eleusis though, these item carrying missions are story scripted and monotonously repetetive, they seem to serve very little purpose to the story, and you’ll be revisiting the same locations countless times. The biggest problem with backtracking to this extent in a horror game is that retracing your steps destroys any sense of escalating tension, especially when you’re seeing the same place for the tenth time. Add to that the fact that there are not yet any Steam achievements implemented for this title, and Eleusis begins to feel like quite a grind.

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It does redeem itself to a point by including randomised AI enemies in the third and final chapter of the game. It’s clear that the designers were attempting to draw out the tension before finally unleashing Amnesia inspired roaming enemies upon you when you were least expecting it. But by the time these enemies arrive, you’re so exhausted by the fetch and carry missions that most of the tension is forgotten and it’s almost too late to care. And to add to the frustration, the enemies often get stuck on the environment and tend to see you through walls. Oddly enough, the launcher for the game prompts you with the option to play Eleusis with these AI enemies removed, which begs the question of whether these lumbering psychopaths were just an afterthought, or whether they’re truly integral to the experience?

It’s true though that the AI enemies do add a touch of excitement and can be genuinely frightening. As we’ve learned from other survival/horror experiences, if you see a knife wielding man in hooded cloak running toward you in a darkened village, you don’t hang around to find out what he wants (to be fair this should be valuable knowledge for life). And don’t dare stop to throw any physics objects at him, because they’re still an utterly useless addition. You should probably just run, and running from enemies is a pretty tense affair here. They could have taken it further and captured a real sense of dread if the game hadn’t insisted on dragging us through adventure gaming 101 before unleashing the hounds. And these hounds are often literal hounds – wolves and hunting dogs leaping at you from the shadows. When these enemies catch you – and they will – it’s instant death followed by reloading at the previous checkpoint. The game has no save function whatsoever, so it’s fortunate that the checkpoint system is atleast mildly forgiving.

Eleusis is not a terrible game at all. It’s a serviceable entry into the recent pantheon of survival/horror games. What it does do right is to introduce a unique setting and attempt to integrate a survival/horror experience into a traditional adventure story – a combination which could result in something truly special if it were to strike the right balance. There is genuine atmosphere maintained throughout, especially during the early exploration sections, and visually it looks surprisingly good for such a modest production. Unfortunately though, the story missions are far too uninspired and repetitive, and the game objective is at times so vague that it’s difficult to tell exactly what’s going on. Despite bold intentions, Eleusis is not quite the game it aspires to be.

Pros

  • Impressive visuals
  • Great tense atmosphere
  • Unique setting

Cons

  • Vague plot
  • Repetitive missions
  • Bad enemy AI

Rating: 3 out of 5.
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