LucasArts might be best known for their classic adventure games, or perhaps for their numerous Star Wars games, but the first wave of releases under the LucasFilm Games label was a series of four pseudo-3D action games originally on the Atari. I already played two of them, as they had been created in 1984, though they went unreleased for over a year until LucasFilm secured a publishing deal with Epyx.
The Eidolon, one of the two developed for Epyx in 1985, reuses the Fractalus engine for a very strange first person dungeon crawl. The manual takes the form of a Vernean inventor's journal, chronicling his subterranean travels under the surface of the earth's crust in the titular Eidolon, a powered tunneling vehicle armed with a fireball cannon.
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| Exploring a strange world, to seek out new life forms, and destroy them! |
The journal explains some of the game concepts in-universe, but purposefully leaves a lot of key details out. For instance, there are monsters lurking about these caves which can be destroyed with your cannon, but what the manual doesn't tell you is that the monsters are invulnerable until you get quite close, and you can waste a lot of energy and time shooting at them from outside the kill range before you realize this. And it explains that there are four types of colored fireballs you can fire (destructive red, energizing yellow, freezing blue, and transmogrifying green), but gives me no reason why I'd ever want to bother using anything but red. And indeed, I never discovered any reason to, except for at the end of levels, where you are forced to. More on that later.
Despite using a more advanced iteration of the Fractalus engine, I found Eidolon to be ugly and unpleasant to look at. There's no equivalent of the former game's show-stopping re-entry sequence, and there's not much to look at except monochromatic walls - essentially an inversion of Fractalus' craggy landscape. Fractalus can get away with a bit of abstractness, given you're flying over the landscape and rarely need to be all that spatially aware, but in Eidolon you're navigating a maze, and the spatial demands are much higher than what can be visually communicated.
It took some tries before I quite figured out what The Eidolon is all about, but eventually I got good enough to consistently reach the eighth and final level, but I can't beat it.
Some basics about how the game works - very little of this is explained in the manual:
- Each level is a maze, with three regular monsters hiding somewhere in it, plus a dragon.
- Find and destroy the dragon to win the level. The C-H gauge helps you find it.
- Each regular monster has a colored key card that you can collect after destroying it. A barrage of red fireballs is all you need (once you move in close enough) but easy does it - fireballs drain your batteries quickly and you have little power to spare for overkill.
- There are also a number of fireballs just bouncing around the corridors.
- Yellow and green fireballs can be scooped up with the space bar for more energy.
- Blue fireballs can be collected to freeze time for a few seconds, but you can't hurt enemies during this time.
- Red fireballs hurt you, but can be neutralized by shooting them with your own reds. Easier said than done - imprecise graphics and abysmal framerate make it hard to tell if you were successful, and if you fire a second red by accident, well, now you just have a new red fireball to deal with.
- The dragon is shielded by an invisible force-field which will be opened by a specifically-colored key card. Later levels require two or three of them.
The dragon fights are chaotic and visually incoherent, but there's a logic to them. Each level's dragon is vulnerable to a specifically colored fireball, and only trial and error can help you find it. The trick is that when you inflict damage, you see sparks fly, but when you don't, it's damn near impossible to tell if it's because you flung the wrong color, or you missed, or it was neutralized by the dragon's own ordinance. But it's not randomized, so you're good once you learn. And if you get low on energy, you can recharge by hanging back and mashing the space bar to absorb the dragon's attacks - only red ones can't be absorbed, and most of the time you'll heal faster than you get hurt.
Here's a video of my best attempt:
There's another aspect to The Eidolon which isn't obvious, and isn't necessary to begin playing, but absolutely crucial to understand if you want any chance of finishing the game. You don't need every key-card to beat most levels. However, unused key-cards carry over level to level, and if you kill every monster on the first four levels, you will have exactly enough key-cards to finish the rest of the game. So do it! Then you may ignore the rest of the non-dragon monsters completely. You're on a tough time limit, and the deeper you delve, the more complicated the mazes, and the nastier the monsters. The less time spent fighting them later on, the better.
The eighth level is dark and confusing to navigate. Floating fireballs do help get your bearing.
And then there's a seven headed dragon at the end. I have no idea how you're supposed to deal with this. I can't manage to destroy a single one of the heads, not even with save states.
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| What's even going on? |
There is footage on Youtube of someone beating the game, and the last fight is roughly three minutes of visual chaos, concluding with a sprite of Nicola Tesla holding a dragon egg.
GAB rating: Bad
Rescue on Fractalus was visually striking but a bit too simplistic. Low difficulty helped make its slow performance bearable, and the look and feel made the experience enjoyable. But The Eidolon is ugly, punishingly sluggish, awkward to control, and needlessly obtuse. Or as "D" put it, "this is lame."
Updates could continue to be slow between now and November, unfortunately. My place of employment tends to go through cycles of idleness, buildup, and crunch, and we're hitting crunch hard thanks to upper management making some wildly optimistic assumptions about the efficiency of vibe coding. You can churn out 75,000 lines of code in a few months without any SME's this way, but the product will be a buggy piece of crap that does maybe 10% of what it's supposed to do, and it turns out the client doesn't want that.
I played my pirated copy of Eidolon for about five minutes, looks like I didn’t miss anything.
ReplyDeleteWhen I hear about vibe coding I’m glad I’m retired from programming. I can definitely relate to management thinking some new development tool will make programming a breeze. Back in the day (a couple of decades ago) as an Oracle developer, our managers would go to presentations where they would tinker with some input screen generating tool. They would auto generate an input form from a single table. The form would do essentially nothing, yet they would come back from the presentation and tell the developers that coding was a breeze.