Lost Eidolons (PC) REVIEW – The Definition Of A Mixed Bag

Eidolons aren't the only thing that's lost here.

Lost Eidolons
Lost Eidolons
Lost Eidolons
Release Date
October 13, 2022
Developer
Ocean Drive Studios
Publisher
Ocean Drive Studios
Platform(s)
PC, PS4, XB1
Microtransactions
None
Our Score
5

It’s no surprise to see role-playing and strategy genres mixing together in many projects, as they’re just such a perfect fit. Role-playing design brings interesting characters and exciting narratives to the table, while strategy design principles enhance the gameplay with engaging decision-making opportunities and management mechanics. Ocean Drive Studio’s Lost Eidolons has the bones of a solid tactical role-playing game, but its unbalanced quality across the board stifles any lasting impression.

Delving into Lost Eidolons, you’ll find yourself dropped into a medieval-inspired fantasy world replete with fantasy creatures, magic, and plotting nobles. You play as Eden, a young, streetsmart, and charismatic mercenary captain from a small town, who’s forced to uproot their familiar life and lead a rebellion against a crumbling tyrannical empire.

You can expect to interact with a wide cast of characters, recruit them, fight battles, level up heroes, manage skills, and upgrade your camp. All-in-all, Lost Eidolons is stuffed with a hefty amount of content in the main narrative and side quests — an impressive feat for a low to medium-budget game.

Lost Eidolons
Lost Eidolons

However, Lost Eidolons is wholly a mixed bag in nearly every aspect. What aspects the developers get right and reach some level of quality, quickly get subsumed by a myriad of puzzling issues.

From the presentation side of things, the highlight is perhaps the sound design. The voice acting is particularly impressive when coupled with decent writing, which all help the player get endeared with the core cast of characters. There’s a notably massive amount of dialogue in Lost Eidolons, which makes it all the more jarring not to hear the solid voice acting in smaller conversations, showing the limitations of the game’s budget.

Music is generally fitting and well-composed throughout the game, with some interesting and contrasting track choices ranging from classic fantasy themes with deep drums and strings, all the way to energetic rock with electric guitar and powerful vocals. Sadly, there’s a severe lack of any ambient music (or sound effects, for that matter) in the plentiful dialogue sections, making the world feel eerily empty.

Lost Eidolons
Lost Eidolons

The graphics department definitely leaves something to be desired. The visuals are serviceable at best and at worst they’re downright ugly, especially when you notice the superbly ugly and distracting background texture work in dialogue or cutscene sections.

Elsewhere, body animations are quite dynamic with hand movements and postures effectively reflecting character emotion and feelings, but yet again it’s contrasted with rough, stilted, and lifeless facial animation that sticks out like a sore thumb, especially given the quality voice acting. The worst part of the game’s visuals is the absolutely atrocious lighting in dark sections of the game where it almost looks like the light gets eaten up by the dark or they simply failed to give most torches the ability to generate light. What’s more, there’s no gamma slider to be found to compensate for this lack of lighting.

Arguably the most consistently fun element of Lost Eidolons’ gameplay is the combat. Unlike other role-playing strategy hybrid games, like King’s Bounty 2, the combat here is less cerebral and is more action-packed and fast-paced, punctuated by impactful and flashy animation scenes to liven up the battlefield.

Lost Eidolons
Lost Eidolons

There’s a great variety of classes and a decent mix of weapon types to customize your party with for solid tactical decision-making opportunities. There’s a neat weapon swap mechanic that makes characters all the more flexible in battle, letting you tackle different combat situations and adapt on the fly.

Terrain and environmental effects also lend themselves to creating a more dynamic battlefield, with the magic system including unique interactions with the geography, such as freezing wet opponents or setting thickets alight with fire. Lost Eidolons sports an engaging weak point system for large creatures, demanding an understanding of positioning and action-sequencing, making fights against large creatures all the more fun.

For a role-playing game, a robust equipment system is quite critical, as it’s one of the primary ways of getting invested in your characters and defining their combat roles. Unfortunately, Lost Eidolons has one of the least inspired loot and item systems of any recent role-playing game.

Lost Eidolons
Lost Eidolons

Nearly all items are simply named and classified by their rarity with few, if any, cool names or unique stats to distinguish them from each other. You’re guaranteed to get tired of looking through endless lists of the same common or rare weapons and items, adding pointless repetition and unnecessary content bloat to the game. This also has the effect of making merchants nearly useless, as many of them simply sell a bunch of copies of the same weapons that you’re likely to be flush with anyway.

The biggest strength of Lost Eidolons’ narrative is the heart of its story found in the friendships of the core characters: Eden, Leon, Francisco, Robin, and Robere. They’re an absolute delight to get to know and interact with and it’s clear that they’ve been fleshed out as characters, in effect helping prop up any slower or less enticing sections. However, some character motivations do feel forced and nonsensical, raising questions about the overall world-building.

Throughout the game, you’ll spend plenty of time in camp sections where you’ll manage your party and pick up new quests to take on. Unfortunately, these parts can get repetitive and tedious with plenty of backtracking, though the fast travel system does help cut down on some of it. Character interactions, especially the fully voiced ones, also help improve camp activities.

Lost Eidolons
Lost Eidolons

Aside from the gameplay and presentation, Lost Eidolons has a slew of moderately grating issues that further dampen its successes. Some of these include awkward controls that are clearly optimized for gamepad use and a console experience, leaving the mouse and keyboard by the wayside.

The UI is fiddly and inefficient; equipping characters with new items and checking their stats takes way too long, which is only compounded by the subpar controls. In addition, there’s no way to save or pause during the numerous cutscenes and dialogue sections, which can be incredibly annoying if you want to enjoy the voice acting, writing, and world, but can’t afford to sit through long sections of dialogue at a time. This simply takes away player control and limits their ability to approach the game on their own terms.

Perhaps the most notable of these issues is the game’s poor pacing and choppy editing. The very start of the game and its tutorial section, as well as the intro cutscenes, are some of the most confusing and frustrating parts of the game, which do more in harming your understanding of what’s going on than help you immerse yourself in the world. Oddly enough, most of the central narrative is relatively easy to follow.

Lost Eidolons
Lost Eidolons

The best example of the choppy editing and poor scene setting is most of the dialogue sections in that they’re split up into several smaller sections with annoyingly long wind-up times to trigger. Essentially, there’s this jarring start-and-stop feel to the major dialogue sections, be it in or out of combat, which seems like the developers are padding their game.

The technical element of the game is mostly polished, though there are noticeable frame drops during intense animation scenes involving magic spells, so there’s clearly some optimization work that still needs to be done. If you meet recommended specifications, then you should be fine as the game isn’t too taxing, but expect slowdowns with magic use.

Lost Eidolons
Lost Eidolons

Ultimately, Lost Eidolons has a lot of strong elements going for it that get the heart of role-playing games done well, which is its main characters, due to the solid voice acting and decent writing. The combat system is also quite enjoyable, though perhaps not paced out quite perfectly to counteract some of the game’s weaker elements.

In all other aspects, it does seem that the dev team was either strapped for budget, lacking in experience, or both, as there are many basic missteps in story-telling, character customization, and technical elements that bring the game down. Lost Eidolons is a serviceable role-playing game that we can only recommend getting on a sale or if you’re a hardcore TRPG fan.

A code for Lost Eidolons was provided by PR for the purposes of this review. 

READ MORE: 50 Best Strategy Games of All Time

Some of the coverage you find on Cultured Vultures contains affiliate links, which provide us with small commissions based on purchases made from visiting our site. We cover gaming news, movie reviews, wrestling and much more.

Lost Eidolons
Verdict
The characters form the heart of Lost Eidolons, but a whole slew of grating and annoying issues makes this a run-of-the-mill tactical role-playing game.
5