Eschalon: Book III Preview

Softpedia has produced a write-up and a gameplay video for Eschalon: Book III, the final installment in the indie turn-based RPG series. Here’s a snip from the write-up:

There are some nice mechanics such as being able to gear your attacks toward doing more damage but having a lower chance to land and vice-versa, and the option to have your character go thirsty or hungry, which adds a new level of complexity to the game, as you have to plan your forays into the wild, and not just wander off.

This is a good indication of how the game plays, you don’t just go in and mindlessly spend a couple of minutes bashing heads, you have to be really careful and prepared, and you have to take advantage of every little thing you can, even abusing the AI, because the game is very, very difficult.

If you don’t have a torch in range, dungeons get darker, and if you don’t carry a torch yourself, you’ll quickly find your hit chance severely dropping when trying to teach some pesky cockroaches a lesson. And they can also spray some goo on you and blind you, further adding to the penalty.

You can get bitten by leeches while simply traveling in swamps, if you’re barefoot, resulting in you getting diseased. And traveling barefoot isn’t just a nod to a popular fantasy series featuring hobbits, it also helps you make less noise when you’re sneaking around.

In fact, many of the game’s critters and environments are actively trying to get you killed, by either brutal murder or slow, withering disease that you generally have to try and cure pretty fast, because some of them will severely impact your abilities (such as a 75 percent penalty to strength).

You certainly won’t be running around steamrolling throngs of baddies; your time will more likely be spent trying to get monsters separated from the group using some trees or a wall, or valiantly manning a choke point, and then taking them on one at a time, or at least more spread out so that you can quickly dispatch one before having to deal with another.

Spotted on RPGWatch.