The Star Named Eos Review (Pseudo)
The Star Named Eos is an aggressively sentimental point and click puzzle game where you play a young man named Dei who is trying to replicate the photos sent to him in the mail by his mother. In order to do this, he has to navigate several elaborately constructed rooms where everything he owns is locked behind a puzzle that requires him to decipher secret messages encoded in his childhood books, or move his clothes around following the rules of a tile puzzle rather than simply lifting them like a normal person. The Star Named Eos was released in 2024 by Silver Lining Studio, developers of Behind the Frame which is a similar explore-the-environment and ”why does my bedroom have so many puzzles in it?” game.
You navigate the game by rotating a 360 degree view around the room you’re in, clicking on interactable items in the surroundings letting you pick them up, examine them closer, or use items on them. Standard point and click adventure stuff. Occasionally, moreso towards the latter half of the game, you will need to use your camera to make progress through the puzzle by finding a specific point in the environment to take a photo of, though this is always clearly telegraphed.
The art is beautiful and hand drawn, and the voice over narration is quite good. The story follows Dei recreating his mother’s journeys, as well as replicating her photos, and uncovering more about their relationship. Everything is accompanied by tinkling pianos music and strings. It’s very cinematic.
I did run into one bug that soft locked me out of continuing the game (I took a camera out during a specific moment, which then prevented me from interacting with an object I needed to interact with as well as leaving me unable to close the camera view.) However reloading put me right where I left off pretty painlessly so it wasn’t a big deal. The game otherwise functioned perfectly and the controls and UI were well designed.
The Star Named Eos costs 14.99 USD, and I was able to complete it in about three hours. There are a number of collectible photos you can find as well by taking photos of interesting things in the different environments, so you may get more game time by 100%ing it and looking for these collectibles. Also, I want to say that as an admitted point and click adventure dumdum, I was able to solve every single puzzle in the game except one without needing help (and that one was a doozy in my opinion.) So the puzzles are challenging enough but with patience the game is quite solvable.
My biggest problem with the game was its sentimentality. Endless voice overs about finding beauty and never giving up hope and that amid darkness there’s always light and so on and so on. By the end of the game I was writhing in agony anytime a voice over started because I knew I was in for several minutes of platitudes.The one time I did get a bit choked up by the story I felt more manipulated than moved. Take me with a grain of salt here, less cynical people seem to find this game very moving. I just thought the game was all gentle reassurances with no real point. However if you enjoy point and click puzzle games, or games that get described as “cozy” then you will likely find this game in your wheelhouse.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the game, and if you’re interested please follow my Steam Curator page Hidden Gem Highlights for reviews of lesser known titles like this of all genres.