The Star Named EOS review: Retracing your steps goes a long way

From developer Silver Lining Studio and publisher PLAYISM, The Star Named EOS is a puzzle game that has a big focus on telling a story while looking good doing it. The whole world is hand-drawn, and the game lets you know it’s time to pay attention when the screen is brought to life with gorgeous animation. The moments in between the highlights feel a little divorced from everything else, as the walls dividing puzzles and reality are ill-defined. But there’s plenty of love in both the puzzles and story being told, and that goes a long way to elevate the experience.

A photographic journey

There isn’t a whole lot I can say about the story in explicit detail. That’s because EOS is relatively short, and the plot is quite mysterious… until it isn’t. Even the premise isn’t as straightforward as it seems. You’re Dei, a photographer who is retracing his journalist mother’s steps on a trip she went on sometime in the past. As you follow her footsteps you recreate photos she sent you on her travels, solving puzzles to unlock various parts of each set piece you have to manipulate. Once you take the matching photo you move on to another time and place, and the mystery of what’s, you know, actually going on becomes more apparent.

The premise is pretty much the whole game. Like I said, it’s quite short and the pattern is key to the core gameplay… until it isn’t. Sort of. Anyway, the actual interactive parts of EOS are neat, especially because of the game’s perspective. It’s first-person, but you’re basically moving the camera at a fixed perspective around a hand-drawn space. It looks nice and really emphasizes how personal the visuals are, like you’re exploring a space and a moment rather than a collection of digital assets. Interactions are simple and clearly communicated by a changing cursor, so there isn’t much pixel-hunting involved at all. The puzzles also lead into each other fairly organically, so the mystery stays within the realm of story rather than having the player possibly confused about what they can or can’t do.

Who put this stuff here?

Puzzles are very much traditional video game-style puzzles. There are locked cases with bizarre security mechanisms, literal puzzle boxes you have to solve, hidden objects, so on and so forth. Solving this stuff has the vibes of old school PC puzzle games for kids, where you just kind of have to suspend your disbelief due to how absurd it would be for a child to grow up in such a hellish environment, in which their cruel parents lock up all their belongings like clues in an escape room. Presumably what you see as the puzzle-solving audience and the reality the characters in the game see are different. It would be pretty funny though if Amtrak prohibited passengers from eating until they find the missing handles to their silverware drawers.

For the most part the puzzles are reasonable, with many of them asking you to look for details in the environments, or simply follow a chain of logic as new items are added to your inventory. Only once did I need help, and that’s only because I had an object in my inventory from a previous chapter I hadn’t used yet, and hadn’t considered needing to look for that kind of thing. There’s no in-game hint system, but with that little nugget in hand you probably won’t need one. There are a couple of sliding puzzles though, so if you hate those I can only offer you sympathy. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, those godforsaken sliding puzzles.

Diegesis and stuff

When it comes to a game like this, the key piece is how well the puzzles feed into the story, and vice versa. It’s hit or miss in EOS, with some parts feeling seamless and others feeling like a video game summoning puzzles into the world because it’s a video game and it has to. The story being told feels a little clumsy too, due to how badly it wants the big emotional payoffs to also be a big reveal. Things move from being incredibly vague almost to the point of mundanity, to escalating in a way that feels artificial. The stuff on the other side of the reveal, after all the cards are on the table, smooths out and feels more authentic. At that point the message is able to proceed without the gimmicks obscuring it. But the whole other half of everything that got in the way first softens the impact.

Looking at The Star Named EOS as a whole, it’s a good time. The lovely visuals and animations are almost worth the price of admission alone, and the story being such a strong element in contrast with its short length seals the deal. It’s an easy recommendation for fans of puzzle games and quiet, but serious storytelling. That said, the story isn’t remarkable, and often suffers from its own insistence on being a mystery for the first half and some change. EOS is a good time but has things holding it back from being an amazing time. “Solid” is the word of the day here, with a capital S.

The Star Named EOS is available on July 23 for PC, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. A PC code was provided by the publisher for this review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.