Eschalon Book II (PC) review "Eschalon Book II picks up right where the first left off, explaining enough as you go along so that you don’t need to have any prior experience with the series to get your full enjoyment out of it. Furthermore, all the qualities that led to the first game’s fantastic reception are back. Open exploration and non-linear storytelling enable you to complete quests at your leisure. Customizable character creation enables you to assign attribute and skill points however you wish. And an innumerable list of strategies and methods of play lay at your fingertips."

You wake up in a lone cottage outside the nearby town of Eastwillow. You don’t remember who you are or why you’re there. As you search for scraps of food and a steady source of water, you find a note outside your door. The note, written by a stranger named Darus, instructs you to meet him at the town’s inn. Despite the obvious danger, you trust him. There he briefly explains to you your past, how you were once a member of a secret guild known as Crius Vindica and its role in the war in the neighboring land of Thaermore. But before he can tell you where you need to go next, a skilled assassin shoots him in the head with an arrow. From there, you can choose to pursue Darus’ killer, or you can just take the arrow to sell it. Either way, your next task will be to discover the significance of the strange viewing glass you found on Darus’ person.

Eschalon Book II picks up right where the first left off, explaining enough as you go along so that you don’t need to have any prior experience with the series to get your full enjoyment out of it. Furthermore, all the qualities that led to the first game’s fantastic reception are back. Open exploration and non-linear storytelling enable you to complete quests at your leisure. Customizable character creation enables you to assign attribute and skill points however you wish. And an innumerable list of strategies and methods of play lay at your fingertips.

In Eschalon, every action you take has a consequence. Simply walking a step uses a turn, which gradually advances the minutes in a day, promotes minor shifts in weather, and marginally decreases hunger and thirst ratios. Built up over a large period of time, these things quickly become obvious, because, really, who pays attention to the amount of time they spend walking? It’s an attention to detail that if ignored, can cost you. Like when you’re traipsing through a forest in the middle of the night slaughtering giant beetles. With the aid of a magic spell, your eyes pierce the surrounding darkness with ease, enabling you to strike with the same precision as if you were fighting by day. Your foes have no such luck. Spotting your last target, you fire off an arrow, but then the sun slowly begins to creep on the horizon. Suddenly, your advantage disappears as the massive insect regains its accuracy, quickly closes on your position, and gores you dead.

Even weather plays a vital strategic role. A howling thunderstorm makes torches virtually useless, and even the slightest rainfall at night will make the darkness absolute, which reduces the effectiveness of any magical sight. Blizzards cause freezing damage that if allowed to build up over time, can severely weaken your character. Camping in these conditions is suicidal because rather than heal, you just receive frost damage at a highly accelerated rate than if you just walked back to town.

To add to the complexity, poorly constructed characters can lead to your swift demise. I made the mistake early on, with my first attempt at creating a ranger. Instead of focusing the scant few skill points allowed me at the beginning into important fighting and survival traits, I spread things out. This cost me later when I realized that I couldn’t even kill a stupid wasp without suffering serious injury or even death. It was then that I restarted, created a better-prepared bowman, and took that character to victory.

Of course, that isn’t to say I didn’t have any other problems. Money is often hard to come by. A ranger needs to buy everything from arrows to potions to food (because even with foraging, you’ll become hungry quickly). You’ll also need to pay to repair equipment (a rather costly proposition with expensive armor) and identify unknown items (a constant concern for non-mages). Without any negotiating skills, you must pay double the market price and sell at half an item’s value, which means you’d better know what you’re looking for when you do your shopping. Your primary source of income comes from completing quests and, later, selling pricey equipment. Supplementary income from random chests just acts as a bonus. These won’t sustain you very long.

It’s true that you can invest points into cost-effective abilities such as Lore, Foraging, Repair, Alchemy and Mercantile, but then you curb your fighting advantage. Experience comes in limited quantity. Monsters don’t respawn when killed, and quests are finite in number. If you’re a bastard, you can butcher innocent townsfolk for extra experience, but then you might find yourself at the mercy of the virtually invincible Commonwealth Guard. Regardless of how you play, this means you only have a relatively small number of levels in which to properly plan your character.

That’s not to say these non-combative abilities aren’t important. Invest in them well (that is, without compromising your ability to fight), and you’ll have a much easier time of things. You’ll have more money to buy expensive equipment because you don’t have to pay to mend damaged items. You won’t have to eat and drink as much because you’ll be spending less time going back and forth between town and dungeon. You’ll be able to open tightly secured locks without breaking piles of weapons, and you’ll be able to disarm traps that can cause an array of afflictions from virulent diseases to deadly poison to explosive injury. The trick is finding the right balance. Invest too much or too little in one of these skill categories, and you’ll be struggling heavily throughout the rest of the game at best, and frequently dead at worst.

Though completing your journey proves quite challenging, that doesn’t take away from the sheer thrill of exploring an incredibly detailed world. Verdant forests, frozen wastelands and gaping bluffs combine to form a rather unique landscape that’s absolutely gorgeous. Both the people and creatures that populate these areas fit the terrain well, adding to the sense of completeness extant in Eschalon’s mythology.

The arctic city of Durnore is home to the dwarves and their strange, spiritual manners. Their reverence for snow wolves leads to a peculiar quest where you must steal one of the alpha female’s adorable puppies without harming the mother herself. The dwarves also hold the mine of Hammerlorne Mountain sacred, and will smite all trespassers that enter its holy halls.

Underneath Ironpool Dam lies a dark secret. Those brave enough to risk death and disease to explore the deepest reaches of the structure will stumble upon a ruined city thriving with the vengeful spirits of its former inhabitants. In the pitch-blackness of this forgotten place, ghouls lurch toward you with reckless abandon. Though slow, their strikes will tear inattentive players to pieces. Skeleton archers try to peg you from afar while their warrior cousins close in on you with nasty curved blades. Somewhere roams the Prospector, a wrathful and manipulative ghost that torments the souls trapped within this pit of despair. Your reward for slaying him will be a unique artifact that, when combined with its sisters, will grant you a jaw-dropping amount of experience.

When they first conceived of the Eschalon series, Basilisk Games envisioned a return to the classic RPGs of old, where the only thing keeping you alive was a bit of luck and your own ability to create well-balanced characters as well as formulate effective strategies. Although Eschalon: Book II and its sibling are much more merciful than older staples like Ultima and Wizardry, it still presents a refreshing challenge not seen in many modern games of this genre. It also succeeds in bringing to life the other old-school adage: an open world rife with creativity everywhere you look. Whether it’s the thought-out history, the detailed environment, the attention to realism, or even just the freedom to do almost anything you want, you’ll come away with something memorable.

Staff review by Leslie Dickson (November 04, 2010) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.