Éalú, from first time developers Beyond the Bark, starts with a strong premise: You are a mechanical mouse looking to escape a mysterious labyrinth. But its presentation is what really blows the doors down: Nearly everything is made out of wood, and rendered in full-on, stop-motion animation.
Not real models keyframed to sprites either, such as the recent Judero or classics like Fallout and Doom: Every possible permutation of every scene in the game was painstakingly recorded and captured, with the real, physical labyrinth of Éalú (or at least its soundstage) living in a shed in a guy's backyard in Ireland.
"Every character, set, and movement was animated by hand by a single animator (myself)," said designer Ivan Owen. "There is no sprite for the main character—a clockwork mouse. Instead, I animated the mouse in situ in over 70 physical sets and created every single action it takes, resulting in 512 animation clips to create the experience."
The result is delightful and somewhat unsettling, like a cross between Myst and Wallace and Gromit—cozy, but also lonely, with flashes of something sinister here and there. Your little mouse is adorable and endearing, with tons of character to how he motors through each scene, idling by slowly rocking back and forth, his literal gears turning, maybe slightly impatient like Sonic the Hedgehog checking his wristwatch and looking at the camera.
He can also suffer gruesome death. A wire sticking out of the corner of the room, perhaps the tail of a friendly fellow mouse in this lonely labyrinth? Clicking on it causes a giant (well, regular-sized) kitchen knife to fly out of the wall and chop our guy up. Another point of interest caused a wall to fall on top of the poor squeaker, crushing him to bits.
All great gags, but their final effect will depend on how failure will be handled in the final game: Right now, the puzzles are all reset and Monsieur Mouse wakes up back at the beginning. The death traps will start to get really old if M. Mouse doesn't get checkpoints or the Dagger of Time or something—maybe reset him at the beginning, but keep the puzzles solved?
But adequately cushioned, and paired with Éalú's melancholy isolation, I think Beyond the Bark is cooking with a really special, singular atmosphere. This is also a game where you'd want to take notes and/or draw your own map—I was able to muddle through with keen gamer sense of direction only because I was just playing the early bits for impressions.
Speaking as a dumbass, it did not take long until the puzzles in the labyrinth really started to stump me: The ones I saw felt very geometric and mental-math focused, like the toughest Breath of the Wild shrines or BioWare's many Tower of Hanoi puzzles if they seriously beefed up at the gym.
For the first puzzle in the game, you have to rotate two halves of a broken heart to face each other, with two switches rotating both haves a mismatched number of turns clockwise or counter-clockwise—it makes way more sense to see it in action.
From there, the challenge started to really ramp up. The wordless presentation and sense of being, well, a mouse in a maze, are definitely part of the whole appeal of Éalú, but a visual or highlight-based optional hint system—"Look here, numbnuts!"—would not go amiss in the final game.
That's a matter of taste, though, and I'm sure PC Gamer's true puzzle heads would rightly shove me in a locker for suggesting it: "Get gud or go back to Elden Ring, nerd!" The only real fault I found in Éalú's demo was a certain sluggishness to its controls.
The mouse can be a bit slow to respond to commands, and I'd appreciate a bit more visual and audio feedback for both hovering over, and clicking on interactive bits in the environment—nothing crazy, but maybe the audio equivalent of the lightest controller rumble for the former, and a woody tap for the latter. And never has a game demanded an aesthetically appropriate variation of the "little gauntlet cursor" more than this one.
But a degree of latency certainly makes sense with Éalú's unique, basically FMV presentation, and it also isn't a dealbreaker in a slow-paced puzzle game. Éalú's audaciously unique look and sense of atmosphere are already carrying the day for me, and the team still has time to iron out the kinks.
Now I just need enough people to check the game out for me to crib off their puzzle solutions. Éalú is scheduled to launch on October 2. While there isn't a public demo yet, you can still wishlist the game on Steam.
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