It’s good for a quick diversion and that’s it. If you play it for about an hour or two, I don’t imagine you’ll feel the need to play much more. Players can only move connected cards of the same type and it’s a relatively interesting and somewhat hard version of Solitaire.īut it won’t keep your attention. The core of the game is trying to match four cards which will then “Seal” a tableau, the place the cards are laid. Honestly it’s a fun FreeCell game, but it won’t keep your attention for long. While there’s no primary game in Eliza, there is a bonus Solitaire game that is heavily based on and influenced by FreeCell, and to be honest, it’s not a bad version of FreeCell with its own twists that will make it more interesting. Almost every game they have released includes a secondary game. On the other hand, there is a bonus game, which has become a Zachtronics trait. Eliza is a Visual Novel and while some Visual Novels are deeper than this, I find Eliza to be perfectly fine with how it turned out. This isn’t like the Walking Dead games, where they promise choices will matter, or that there might be more than just a story. It would be very easy to complain about it, and I would but Zachtronics was upfront about this being a Visual Novel. This isn’t meant to be an “adventure” but rather a storybook.
Most of the game focuses on choosing from different options and watching the game play out and as a bit of a spoiler, none of your choices outside of the final choice will change the ending. As a visual novel, this isn’t that surprising. These scenes are exceedingly rare, but I still find the voice acting to be a necessity for this game as it improves the experience and it’s one of the highlights of Eliza. The parts of the game with no voice acting, limited only to Evelyn’s (the main character’s) internal monologue are weaker, due to the lack of voice acting. The voice acting was good enough that I felt reading the dialogue was detrimental to the experience because the voice actors were doing a superior job. Every character is well done and has a lot of personality in their delivery. On the other hand, the one place that Eliza does well is the voice acting. This guy will flip out but remain staring at the ground the entire time. If the character sounds like they are looking up at you in the story or are getting agitated there could be some reaction from the character but instead, it’s just the same image every time you have a session with that character. The fact is Eliza isn’t horrible, and the locations and characters look good, but the graphics don’t add much to the experience, because it’s just the same as looking at a photograph for the most part.Įven when you have serious and important sessions with characters, they always appear in the same manner and will look at the same area of the room, because they are just a single image. Even if the audio and text make it clear they are moving to stand closer, the graphics don’t change, and thus you get a static image. There are not even animations as they enter or move around. The characters themselves don’t react or emote at all, they’re just stock images that stand still. There’s one (maybe two) outfits for Evelyn but they don’t change at all. All the other characters are similarly dressed the same for a majority of the game. The main character Evelyn spends most of her time in a jacket and hoodie combo. These characters are nothing more than a single image. Most of the game focuses on rather mundane locations like a subway car, a coffee shop, or an office and show two-dimensional images of the characters talking. PresentationĮliza’s graphics are a bit plain for a game. At the same time, with Zachtronics having a large amount of unique and interesting games, this had me curious to see where they take the experience. Most of their games have a minor story component to them, but to remove the entire gameplay part of the story and focus only on the Visual Novel concept is a huge departure for the studio. There have been programming computers in TIS-100, Exapunks, and Shenzen I/O, programming waldos in Spacechem and Magnum Opus, as well as even automating factories in Infinifactory. They are well known for their programming games where players solve puzzles through some form of instruction based gameplay. This is not what I would have expected from Zachtronics.
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