Eschalon: Book III Review

Introduction

Eschalon: Book III is the finale of Basilisk Games’ roleplaying trilogy, following in the footsteps of Book I (released in 2007) and Book II (2010).  Book III picks up right where Book II left off, with you being hurtled through space and time into the jungles of Wylderan, where you must once again search for the fabled crux stones so you can thwart the plans of Malkur, aka The One.  Because the memory of your character is a little bit finicky — you wiped it before the start of Book I to hide your intentions from Malkur, and you’ve had trouble remembering things ever since — you start over with a new character in Book III, and you can have events from the previous games explained to you if need be, which means you can play Book III even if you’ve never touched Books I or II.

Character Creation

When you begin a game of Eschalon: Book III, you have to create a new character, and this requires you to make some decisions.  You have to choose a gender (where males get +1 strength and females get +1 dexterity), an origin (which gives you +3 to your attributes, depending on where you decide to be from), an axiom (a world belief that gives you a bonus and a penalty, or no change at all if you choose agnostic), and a class (fighter, healer, magick user, ranger or rogue).  Your gender, axiom and class combine to give you a title, which in turn gives you a point in one of the game’s 26 skills.  As an example, if you decide to be a male virtuous fighter, then you become a paladin and receive a point in the swords skill.

Each character has eight attributes, where four (including strength and endurance) are tailored more for physical fighters, and four (including intelligence and concentration) are more for spellcasters.  When you create your character, you get to roll the starting values for these attributes as many times as you’d like, with the values always falling between 7 and 14.  You also receive 20 points to spend freely after you’ve accepted a roll.  Then each time you gain a level, you get three more points to spend.  You can also add to your attributes through (rare) bonuses on your equipment, and from (rarer) events in the game.  Most attributes give you a concrete bonus every five to ten points — for example, strength adds +1 to your melee damage every five points, and +1 hit point per level every ten points — and so you have to plan ahead where you want your points to go.  The attribute bonuses aren’t retroactive, so most people will probably put points into endurance (for more hit points) or perception (for more mana) early in the game.

Characters also have access to 26 skills: seven weapon skills (including swords and bows), three armor skills (including heavy armor and shields), two magic skills (divination and elemental), five rogue skills (including pick locks and move silently), and nine utility skills (including cartography and repair).  This is a nice mix of skills, and they give you plenty of options for how to spend the 15 skill points you receive during character creation, plus the three you receive each time you gain a level.  Skills have diminishing returns, and they’re all useful in their own way, so characters are more powerful when you spread your points around rather than dumping them all into one place.  To help you out in your skills, you can meet some trainers in the game, who can teach you ranks of a skill (up to rank 8) for a cost — and usually only if they like you, and you do something for them first.  You can also find skills books, and use them once for each skill.

Along with the skills, characters can learn up to 47 spells in the game, including Spark, which zaps enemies with electricity, Cat’s Eyes, which lets you see better in the dark, and Portal, which allows you to move around the world more quickly.  All classes of characters can learn spells, with the number and quality of them depending on the character’s attributes and magic skills.  So a full-fledged magick-user will be able to cast a lot of powerful spells and regenerate mana points quickly, but even a fighter should be able to pick up some healing and buff spells to make life easier.

Characters can reach somewhere around level 20 in the game, which nicely isn’t enough time for them to become a master of everything, even if you plan ahead so they visit trainers as much as possible.  I played an unarmed specialist in Book III, mostly because I hadn’t tried one yet in the trilogy, and also because Basilisk Games added unarmed weapons (think brass knuckles) to the equipment you can find.  Unarmed characters have the best weapon feat in the game (characters gain access to special weapon attacks — called feats — when they reach rank 10 in a weapon skill), and I pretty much cruised through the campaign with my pugilist.  But whether that’s because unarmed characters are powerful, or the game is easy, or I just know the engine too well at this point, it’s tough to say.

Finally, before starting the game, you also have to toggle some rules on or off, where the more rules you leave on the tougher the game is, but the better equipment you find, and the more experience points you earn.  There are four rules in total: characters need to eat and drink, equipment needs to be repaired, item drops are fixed rather than random, and saves can only be performed when no enemies are around and your character is healthy.  Since I was doing prep work for our (soon to be) walkthrough while I was playing, I only had the first two rules on.  The rules allow you to tune the game so you can enjoy it more, but they’re not really difficulty settings.  There isn’t any way to make enemies smarter or tougher.

Gameplay

Eschalon: Book III, like its predecessors, uses a turn-based engine.  That means you take your turn, then enemies and NPCs take their turn, and then the cycle repeats.  Fortunately, enemies and NPCs perform their actions very quickly, and so the game can be played at almost any pace you want.  It’s not the case, for example, that you have to take a step and then wait, take a step and then wait, and so forth, making a trip through a forest interminable.  You can just keep the left mouse button pressed, and your character will walk towards it, seemingly in real time.  Other than battles against archers (who generally have lengthy attack animations), the game doesn’t feel turn-based at all.

What you do in the game is pretty much RPG standard fare: you explore maps, you talk to people and accept quests, you kill enemies, you earn experience points and gain levels, you hunt for better equipment, and then you confront the bad guy at the end.  Book III, I think, is at least average in all of these elements, which doesn’t sound like much of a compliment, but if you have a Major League Baseball team where all of the players are at least average, then you’ve got a good chance at winning the World Series.  Book III isn’t a World Series contender, but it’s solid entertainment.  Let me discuss the five game elements in order.

The maps in Book III work really well.  Basilisk Games, like Larian Studios, have always been good about rewarding players for taking the time to explore carefully.  In Book III, Basilisk added 30 “secret areas” to the maps, and you gain experience points plus some other reward — like a treasure chest, gold pieces, or even an attribute point — for finding them.  As an example, when you start out the game in an inactive volcano, if you happen to notice and follow a narrow path in one corner of the map, then you find a chest with a skill book inside, which is a nice welcome gift.  In general, the maps are designed well, and they have a nice mix of flora and inside/outside elements to keep gameplay interesting.

The quests in Book III are all on the simple side.  You meet somebody, they tell you what they want you to do, and then you do it or not.  I can only think of two places where you’re given a reasonable choice for how to proceed.  Basilisk Games is good about allowing you to kill anybody you want and still complete the main quest line, but other than that, the quests and conversations are workmanlike at best, and there aren’t any memorable characters.  Even the bad guy, who first showed up in Book II, is a non-entity.  If Basilisk Games is able to produce more games in the future (which from my understanding is somewhat in doubt), hiring somebody on the more professional side of writing might be a good idea.

There are roughly 25 (basic) creatures that you can fight in the game, and they have some variety to them.  There are grubs that produce angry maggots when they die.  There are insect swarms that are immune to piercing damage.  There are jellyfish-like creatures that shoot magic darts, which you can resist if you have the right spells / potions / rings.  Some creatures can see in the dark while others can’t, and so spells like Cat’s Eyes and Predator Sight can make tough battles easy.  But the game could have used more enemies, and it especially could have used smarter enemies who are better at working together.  Right now, enemies are susceptible to hit-and-run tactics.  They don’t chase you very far (and never off the current map) and they don’t regenerate their health, which allows you to kill most anything by running away and resting, and then fighting again.

I didn’t keep track of how my character earned experience points in the game, but I’d guess it was roughly 70% from killing enemies and 30% from completing quests and finding secret areas.  Since enemies can interrupt you when you rest, there isn’t a hard limit on your character level, but unless you go out of your way to farm encounters, you’ll probably finish the game around level 20, which is about right for a 25+ hour game.  I’ve already mentioned that there are a lot of options for building up characters, so in all, character development works well in Book III.  There’s always something you need for your character, and you always have another level coming around the corner.

The equipment in Book III is roughly the same as it was in Book II, with one exception.  In Book II, as long as you had at least one point in an associated skill, then you could use any weapon or piece of armor without penalty.  But now in Book III, weapons and armor require different ranks in their skill, and so you need, for example, 4 points in heavy armor to wear a Dwarven Steel Lord’s Helm.  However, these requirements are almost all less than or equal to 7 (where you can get up to rank 10 from trainers and skill books), so they don’t have a huge impact on the game.  Otherwise, the equipment was simply balanced, becoming generally cheaper and lighter (and with some items gaining new icons), and it should remain familiar to anyone who played Book II.  Book III also includes a new set of unique items, but there still aren’t any set items.

Because the writing in Book III isn’t anything special, its campaign also has some problems.  All three games in the trilogy deal with special crux stones, and your goal in Book III is to collect as many of them as you can.  The problem with this is that you start the game with one stone (from Book II), you find another stone by mistake, and while you’re tracking down a third, the game comes to a sudden and unexpected end.  As a result, the campaign doesn’t really feel like a campaign.  It’s mostly just there to provide you with road markers so you have a reason to visit various places in the game world.  The ending confrontation is also a bit strange and weak.  Basilisk tried something different than the typical battle between your character and the big bad guy, but in my view it didn’t work at all, and it concluded the trilogy with more of a whimper than a booming fireworks display.

Fortunately, it looks like Basilisk is going to keep working with the title and add (at least) a free dungeon update, just like they did with Book II.  Basilisk also plans to release some sort of modding tools, allowing players to add their own dungeons and more to the game, so perhaps the official campaign will just be the tip of the iceberg for what you do with Book III.

Game Engine

Eschalon: Book III is played using a fixed 1024×768 resolution.  You can play it in a window (which is what I did), or you can stretch it out to full screen if you want.  The world is gridded, and you’re given an isometric view of your surroundings as you move your character around.  The graphics are 2D, and they aren’t anything special, but they effectively show you what you need to see.  Every so often you witness something unique and interesting, like a wrecked ship or a skull cave, but there aren’t any ooh or ahh moments visually.  Basically, Book III looks like what you should expect from a lowish budget indie title.

To control your character, you use a combination of the mouse and keyboard.  Left-clicking moves your character, interacts with objects, and attacks using your equipped weapon.  If you hold the left mouse button down, then your character continuously walks towards the mouse cursor.  The right mouse button casts your currently selected spell.  You can map spells to the 1–0 keys, and you can place objects (mostly potions) into quick item slots to make them easier to find and use.  The spacebar skips your turn, F2 quicksaves your game, and other keys bring up interface windows for your inventory, quest journal, and so forth.  If you played Book II and this sounds familiar, it’s because it is.  If there’s any difference between the interface for Books II and III, I didn’t notice it while playing the game.  But at least it makes Book III easy to pick up and start playing.

Conclusion

Overall, while the Eschalon trilogy didn’t win a lot of awards or appear on many top 10 lists, all of its games have been solid, and Book III is no exception.  The campaign might take you 25+ hours to complete, and with all of the options for character builds, and with the fundamentally different ways some of those builds play, that means you might spend 50+ enjoyable hours with the game, which is a good deal at its $20 asking price.

That being said, Book III is very similar to Books I and II, so if you didn’t enjoy those earlier games, then you won’t like the new one, either.  But since all of the games are similar, that means you could pick up Books I and II (which you can often find for $5 from online retailers) and inexpensively test out if the series is right for you.  I enjoyed the time I spent with Eschalon, and I’m quite sad to see it end.