Join Chris, host of 1 Hour 1 Decision, as he dives into the world of Ereban for an in-depth review!
Making games is hard. A lot of things really have to come together. The mechanics have to work, the story (if there is one) needs to be engaging, and audio has to really tie this all together. Ereban: Shadow Legacy does some things right but sadly a bunch of things wrong.
Ereban: Shadow Legacy is a game developed and self published by Baby Robot Games. You play as Ayana, the last Ereban, a race with mystical shadow powers and a past just as shrouded in darkness. The game starts off with you working for Helios, a “benevolent” corporation that recruits you to be one of their agents. The tutorial is woven through a first day orientation as you learn how you can use your powers to sneak up on your unsuspecting victims. The first power (and frankly the only one you really need for most of the game) called Shadow Merge, is the ability to melt into any dark spot for a limited amount of time. The mechanic is really cool and super satisfying when you combine it with the backstab (ie: the one offensive move you have). After you progress through this orientation, you’re about to finish getting processed when you get interrupted by someone called “The Pilot”. They bust you out of this place and then you find out that GASP Helios is bad. So you work with this Pilot and the resistance run by a guy named Set to try and take down this big baddie. A serviceable plot with I think aspirations for a sequel or at least a larger universe to expand upon.
After the tutorial, the game opens up and you are then in a semi-open world where you venture off and do objectives. This is where the game kinda went sour for me. The game breaks things up into chapters. The first chapter gave me vibes of a 360era linear stealth platformer, which I was super into! Heck even the loading screens in between gave you tips on how to play and some exposition baked in. At the end of each chapter, you’re given a score based on how many times you got caught, bodies were detected, power-ups you’ve found, etc. But they also throw in this Morality system where you can lean towards good or bad. I wasn’t really clear what affected this choice, but I’m assuming this at least means different endings or maybe different choices are presented.
The game has got an interesting art style to it, it’s got almost a cartoony look and feel to it. It’s a similar style to Sable but without the defined ink lines around the borders of objects. Initially the character designs looked kinda neat - until you see the same characters with their heads swapped out. The animations, especially during conversations, were odd. I noticed character models floating above the floor and they all cycle through similar animations. They did however get these animations to sync pretty well with the dialog. The worlds did look and feel pretty varied but also lifeless. Outside of the robot guards and the few human guards you encounter, there’s no other lifeforms and that was pretty disappointing.
What really disappointed me though was the audio in this game. They took the time to hire some pretty darn good voice actors but the rest of the audio in this game just fell flat. Ereban really made me appreciate the stealth games of yore and how much they tuned audio for their games. It was the little things like walking around or jumping down how I didn’t feel like I didn’t get any sort of appropriate feedback. Even when the enemies were making their rounds, the audio seemed to cut out which would throw off my timing on when to make my moves. Thinking back, I wonder if they just gave a bit more time mastering the audio, my experience would’ve been more positive.
Ereban is an interesting conundrum. There are definitely some really cool concepts that are on display here, Shadow Merge is a very fun mechanic. But the game tries to do too much. A more focused stealth experience rather than trying to add this morality system and multiple path objectives might’ve been a better route. I hope they learn from this experience and come back with something more refined and polished for me to try. Because who really knows when that Splinter Cell remake will come back. Seriously, does anyone know?
Chris is a connoisseur of all things Xbox, especially Game Pass. He loves it so much, in fact, that he created the 1 Hour 1 Decision podcast with his buddy Tom to randomly play and review Game Pass titles!
Click the link below to enjoy more of 1H1D: