If you’re a parent, there’s little you wouldn’t do for your kid. Acting simply upon natural instinct, we will inherently put our children on a pedestal. We want the new generation to have everything we didn’t and live a better life. One of my greatest fears is losing my son, only trumped by the thought of losing my wife, even if it’s not in the traditional sense of death; the thought alone is enough to give me an anxiety attack. If you choose to set forth into the adventure that Elea offers, these are themes you will have to deal with in the first episode.

The story takes place in the future, where a biological disease has struck all of the world’s youth including your own child, resulting in them turning into vicious savages. The only known treatment is to essentially turn them into soulless husks of their former selves. While I don’t quite understand why this was an alternative solution, the powers that be send a shuttle named the Pilgrimage to a newly discovered planet in hopes to start over. Unfortunately, your husband Ethan is on the shuttle and it has lost all communication with the known world. Thirteen years later, you find yourself on a rescue operation to find out the where or what caused the team to go missing.

The story will take you across multiple locales, some more straightforward than others. The early stages task you with navigating your futuristic home as a pregnant Elea during a pretty wicked storm, while the later segments take place on the ship en route to the last known location of the Pilgrimage, and others taking place in…. well I don’t really know how to explain it, but they’re quite different. Throughout your time with Elea, you’ll wonder if there is an otherworldly force that is causing hallucinations, or if Elea is simply going mad due to the loss of her family. Over the course of the story, you’ll experience glitches, flashbacks, and mysterious visions that are thought provoking yet unnerving. The game rarely ventures beyond the hard sci-fi story into horror, yet I was regularly feeling uneasy, thinking something was just around the corner. This can be attributed to the amazing overall visual and audio presentation.

Almost every visual asset looks amazing: bricks show so much detail that they feel as if you could reach out and touch them; metal shines with reflections that look photo realistic; the ocean scene early into the game is downright breath taking. Even the previously mentioned glitches look spectacular, with only mild tearing that doesn’t appear to be part of the visual change rarely breaking immersion. The few exceptions to this are various items that you can pick up and inspect, often looking flat or overly cartoonish, making them stand out much more than they should. The character models could have used a bit more work as well. The human characters all look as if they were taken straight from a wax museum, with overwhelmingly shiny yet flat looking facial features. The ambient sound effects only add to the already immersive experience. Sadly, the writing doesn’t give the voice overs much to work with, leaving yet another weak link in what could have been an amazing chain of events.

The first segment in Elea’s home takes place primarily over the phone, or this world’s version of one, with her husband. Around the five minute mark, their constant use of pet names and loving phrases made me want to gag. Don’t get me wrong, I love my wife, but their conversation was never ending and made me want to run as quickly as possible to the objectives. Much to my disappointment, the developers stuck to reality here and decided that letting a pregnant woman sprint was a bad idea. What I don’t quite understand is why the option is only permitted here and there throughout the rest of the journey, which can be a bit of a slog.

Through the bulk of the game, you’ll be walking as if you’re a geriatric snail, making what would be a quick jog down a hall into an unbearable slow mess. The remaining controls are even more atrocious, with many of the buttons being unresponsive and the look controls being stiff or lacking precision, making interacting with the world a chore. You will have to regularly interact with control panels or door controls, all of which require you to hit the overly small sweet spot to get the icon to pop, letting you know you can interact with it. Most of these actually require you to remain still and stare at the button while a small circle rotates, almost as if the door has to load. Since this is a walking sim with little gameplay, this is a problem.

The bulk of the gameplay will require you to walk from point A to point B; interacting with certain items will allow you to gain backstory into the lore of the hard sci-fi world and of the characters, should you wish to seek them out. The objectives themselves fall into one of two buckets: clear cut requirements that simply require you to look around, observing the world, as well as extremely vague objectives that border on frustration. One of these situations occurs early into the game where I was placed in a large roundish room, with a single window showing a sunset over an ocean (so beautiful), a single locked exit, and a strange sphere in the middle of the room. Walking into the sphere simply starts this over, and doing so three times resulted in the game kicking me back to the main menu. It took me almost an hour at this point to realize I had to zoom in on a vague item out in the ocean. This is just one of the many overly convoluted puzzles the game throws at you, which to be honest, I would’ve given up on long before this point had I not been reviewing it.

While Elea looks simply amazing and offers a thought provoking story, the overall experience feels a bit lacking and needs some additional polish before the additional chapters are released. I really wanted to like this game, but by the end of the chapter the feeling was more forced than anything I’ve experienced in recent memory. If you’re into some of the weirder walking sims, such as North or Asemblance, this might be up your alley. I for one hope the next chapter resolves some of the lingering issues so we can see out Elea’s journey to its climax.

6 out of 10

Pros

• Breathtaking Visuals
• Interesting Story
• Extremely Immersive Presentation

Cons

• Frustrating Controls
• Lackluster Writing
• Painfully Slow Movement Speed

Elea – Episode One was developed by Kyodai Ltd and published by Soedesco. It was released on PC and X1 September 6th, 2018. The game was provided to us for review on X1. If you’d like to see more of Elea, check out the official site.

 

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