Elea
by Aethyna
May 9, 2018 |
1
Votes |
1
Played |
0
Reviews
8
rate
Genres:
AdventureGraphics:
3DLabels:
Adventure , Point-and-Click , Storytelling , Sci-Fi , Space GamesPlatforms:
Publishers:
SOEDESCO Publishing Elea is a first-person adventure game that will put you into the shoes of space scientist, River Elea Catherine Jones as she sets off on a journey across space in hopes of finding her missing husband who was part of a planet-colonizing expedition that had went radio silent. Play Now Similar Games Played
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Summary
Elea is a first-person adventure game that will put you into the shoes of space scientist, River Elea Catherine Jones as she sets off on a journey across space in hopes of finding her missing husband who was part of a planet-colonizing expedition that had went radio silent. Featuring an in-depth and intriguing storyline that will grab you by the arm and not let go, you will not only get to learn more about Elea as a person, but also feel her grief at the loss of her youngest son and subsequently, her husband when his expedition went radio silent for far too long.
Plotline
Although the storyline is the most appealing part of this game, it is not really presented in a way that makes a lot of sense for the player… that is unless you’ve read the summary or the synopsis of the story on either Steam on the game’s official website prior to playing the game.
Anyway, the game begins with you laying on an examination table in a lab where supposedly you are about to subject yourself to a mind- or memory-altering machine, and from what seems to be Elea’s memories or dreams, you will learn a lot more about Elea and her family, what she does for a living, what she’s like, and etc.
However, the main story arc actually concerns Elea’s husband, Ethan. He was part of a pioneering expedition that is charged with colonizing a habitable exoplanet in preparation for the mass exodus of humanity from Earth.
And why is that necessary? Well, apparently, a massive disease has swept across the globe turning children into murdering psychopaths. It is to this terrible disease Elea lost her son, Fransis (this is actually how the game spells his name) and possibly (I’m not exactly sure here) the baby she’s carrying.
However, Ethan’s expedition suddenly went radio silent. Elea immediately signed up to join the recovery team that’s being assemble to investigate what happened to the expedition. This part of the story’s timeline is exactly where you drop in. Join Elea as she travels millions of lightyears in hopes of finding her missing husband.
Gameplay
Elea is a checkpoint-based point-and-click adventure game that doesn’t put a lot of weight in the puzzles department, but instead, places a lot of emphasis on the overall game experience that you get. The game employs an autosave feature which will automatically save your progress once you reached certain milestones in the storyline.
Aside from the few objects that you need to interact with to further advance the story, there are also quite a number of items that you can pick up and admire. To interact, you just need to left click on the item once the hand icon is shown. To cancel, simply right click and you’re done.
There are even several items that you can click on which has a speech bubble-like icon instead. These objects will usually uncover a monologue where Elea will talk about how important the item is to her and why. From these little snippets, you can get an idea of how Elea and her husband are like.
Elea’s movement is quite slow at first mainly because at that part of the storyline, she’s pregnant. However, I’ve noticed that she still walks at a pretty slow pace in the later parts of the story where she’s not heavy with child. It would be nice to be able to run in these parts.
For those who have an aversion towards horror games, well, Elea does have a couple of parts which I personally find to be a bit scary. For instance, there’s a part in her home when the electricity went out, plunging Elea (and by extension, you) into almost pitch-black darkness. The torchlight you are given doesn’t help much either since its beam distance is really poor. You’ll probably be spending a lot of time just looking down at Elea’s feet as you try to make your way to the basement.
As mentioned before, the story isn’t really well-presented in this game. The player should be able to figure out what’s going on, at least bit by bit, as they progress through the game. However, during the first scene, I have no idea what happened at the end when Elea went into her son’s room to wake him up.
The game then quickly cut to a new scene where apparently Elea was back on the Mars’ base where she was working before as a scientist. This is the part where I gave up. I have no idea what to do and hence, I tried everything I know to hopefully trigger the next part of the story, but the game just refuses to let me proceed.
There are times in the first scene where you are given instructions on what to do. This is a great way to solve the problem of not knowing what to do in the later parts of the game. But, it's important for the instructions to be clear. There's one instruction in which you have to find an infopad (and you have no idea what it looks like) is quite vague, unfortunately. It would have saved me some time if the game just included the word “nearby” into the instruction.
Last but not least, the game has a lot – and I do mean a whole lot – of flashing lights and psychedelic colors which fit the game’s theme and story just fine. However, I think the game might have overdone it a bit in this department. I’m not exactly a photosensitive person and I don’t have photosensitive epilepsy or anything like that, but I still experienced severe nausea and dizziness (which frankly feels like the sort of motion sickness I get playing some VR games) within my first hour of playing Elea.
Community
Elea is currently in early access and needs every feedback it can get from the community. If you enjoyed playing the game, be sure to recommend it to your friends who enjoy this type of story-driven adventure as well.
Graphics/ Sound
The graphics look stunning but like I’ve said before, I think that they could cut down a bit on the flashing lights and (intentionally) distorted visuals. They did great in the sound aspect as well. I really liked the voice acting and the somewhat creepy sound effects during the small part when the lights went off at Elea’s home.
Conclusion
All in all, Elea is a brilliant first-person adventure game that is built around an engrossing storyline involving a mother’s pain over the loss of her child and now, the potential loss of her husband as well. However, I feel that the game needs to bring out the storyline more by adding in more story snippets for the player to discover. These snippets will need to be able to allow the players to generally know what’s going on without needing to refer to an external source.
And although I understand the need for such visuals, please do cut down on the photosensitive components of the game! It’s a bit over the top I think.
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