The Star Named EOS Preview

During my time covering the many showcases done this last week with GameGrin, I was curious about The Star Named EOS — a story-rich puzzle adventure. The narrative centres around Dei and his mother, who always sent him letters during her travels, and they always had a photograph attached to them. One day, however, he notices something in one of them that threatens to turn all his beliefs topsy-turvy.

Once we were done covering the event, I went over and downloaded the demo of this really gorgeous upcoming title by developer Silver Lining Studio and publisher PLAYISM.While it's short, it was more than enough to give me a feel for what the gameplay will be like!

In it, we start off in Dei's childhood room. While the game doesn't outright say it, I do believe we're a child at that point because the room seems pretty normal. There, we find one of the mother's letters and the photograph attached, which is a nice shot of a train window with red curtains, a flower, and beautiful rolling hills in the background.

Surprisingly, The Star Named EOS doesn't give you a next step... in fact, it doesn't even give you a first step. It's only because I have played several puzzle titles like these that I realised I had to figure something out in order to get the ultimate answer for this level. This isn't a bad thing by any means — it doesn't take a genius to figure that out! But it was nice to just immediately start off on my adventure, looking for clues.

The miniature challenges scattered around Dei's childhood room reminded me a lot about The Room — one of my favourite (and first) puzzle titles! They all connect to each other, so you'll need to finish them all before you can figure out the overall answer.

While it wasn't evident at first, I eventually realised I had to recreate the mother's photograph in order to advance the story, and I would need to use the items around the room in order to do just that. Once I managed to — which, according to Steam, took me about 23 minutes in total — we jumped straight inside of it and onto the next challenge. Now, I was on the train, and I had all the items I needed laid out in front of me in order to remake her next photograph.

Although I tend to get bored easily with slow games that require my attention (mostly because I'm usually excited to try too many games at once), my gaming radar seemed to have been right — The Star Named EOS has a nuanced and smooth gameplay style that had me asking questions without even having the narrative set, and that's great! I'm very intrigued about what the game will be like when it comes out, as it seems like an intriguing title that you can pick up for a few minutes at a time and then return to once your brain cells are no longer exhausted.

If you like atmospheric and cosy titles with puzzle elements, I highly suggest checking The Star Named EOS' demo out while it's available! It's probably going to be a short game, but there's a lot of quality in the gameplay itself.