I’ve Got a Feeling – Eila and Something Shiny in Review

For the past three days, I’ve been feelin’ it. While driving to work, while lying in bed at night; a melancholy has hung over me like an inescapable shadow. I’m done with Jeffrey CCH’s Eila and Something Shiny, although it doesn’t seem done with me.

This is a difficult one to write about. In the most perfect of circumstances, you would play this solitaire narrative adventure game knowing absolutely nothing about it. Nothing. I am a stickler for spoiler culture myself, but I really believe the optimal experience here is someone willing to become emotionally invested and open to being chewed up and spat out. It’s impossible to write about this game without spoiling elements of it, even if the precise details are omitted. In fact, the association of sorrow with the narrative of the game has already given away too much. But you’re reading this review and consenting to a baseline of information. I will do my best to minimally expose the game’s contents.

I’m already trying to absolve myself of sin. I hate spoilers.

Enough handwringing. This is an unusual release in that it’s North Star Games forging a deal with Hong Kong studio ICE Makes to bring Eila to the United States. Let me tell you, I’m grateful for this partnership.

Look at ‘er. That cute stuffed bunny is an innocent little girl. She’s standing in front of an expanse of land featuring mysterious structures, a mountain, and a glimmer of fascination. It’s a cute and fluffy image, as are the accompanying illustrations in this card-based game. You manipulate little wooden bits depicting carrots, coins, and books. The graphic design is lovely and the overall presentation is class.

This game is not innocent. In fact, it’s somewhat menacing. I’m surprised there is not a subtitle or warning that the thematic content is quite mature. This is a point of criticism many will have with the game. They will sit down to play it with their young child, and it may not go well.

The torment creeps in gradually. You begin with a tutorial chapter that’s peachy. Eila is wandering the forest, picking up some resources and teaching you how the mechanical structure functions. It’s all simple-like. You draw a card from the current chapter deck, smile at the cutesy artwork, and then make a decision based on several options. It’s of the Choose Your Own Adventure lineage, broadly speaking.

Most of the decisions are regarding resources, perhaps spending one to gain another. Sometimes you gain a negative resource, fear. Each occupies a space in your inventory so there’s some management there as well. This is mostly light stuff. The heavy stuff comes later on, in the narrative.

What’s really killer about this system is found in the gameplay loop. Many cards will present decisions with lasting impact. For instance, perhaps a prickly fox confronts you with an obvious desire for violence. You decide to run as opposed to talking him down. The consequence is fishing out another card from a nearby stack and adding it face-down into the discard pile. Once you’ve made your way through the deck, everything is reshuffled and you loop back through. Many cards are permanently removed once resolved, such as that aforementioned fox encounter. The deck evolves.

There’s a sense of dread as you know the result of your decisions will come home to roost. It’s similar to the event system in Robinson Crusoe actually, a game as delightful as this mechanism.

It’s a wonderful flow. The deck is reshaped and the story moves forward in unexpected ways. Many of the cards will remain, so you can strategically plan for their arrival. Imagine a situation where a tax collector will arrive and yoink two of your coins. You can save for this, or perhaps even shield yourself by collecting an item before they return. Maybe the delicious blueberry pie the baker was offering on one of the cards can be used to bribe the mean bugger. Sometimes there are hints of the future and various items and effects combine in strange ways. It’s neat as you see these narrative pathways emerge and collapse over the course of the chapter.

The story chapters also add new rules which liven things up. The rulebook asks you not to read ahead, and the decks themselves are sealed. This presents a soft legacy experience as you continue with the story, chapter-to-chapter, eager to see the new system alterations just as much as the narrative development. Eila appears quite simple at first, but it ramps up quickly, along with the difficulty.

Unfortunately, you do not fail forward here. It’s a bit of a drag repeating a chapter, but you can move rather efficiently through content once you know some of the twists that will arrive. My initial forays took about 30-45 minutes per, but replaying chapters resulted in half that time. Thankfully, this only happened in a couple of instances.

The looping back through the deck, as well as the repetition of replaying a chapter, evokes the vibrations of T.I.M.E Stories. That was such a great game until it wasn’t. It’s not quite the same here as the content feels less focused on drudgery and more about optimally balancing resource gains while bracing for new challenges. The solitaire classic Friday is another touchstone, as you repeatedly take on challenges and flex strategic brain muscles.

Regardless of comparisons, Eila and Something Shiny is ultimately a unique experience as a result of its exploration of narrative. It’s quite amazing how the game grabs ahold of you emotionally with such little exposition. Much of it is visual and symbolic. It leans into themes concerning loss, oppression, and relatively interesting moral quandaries. And it does so by just inserting new cards into a shuffled deck, presenting options to the player and then turning those sharp decisions back on you like a blade reversed against its wielder.

This engine just works. It keeps pulling you along with clever little tricks and solid writing. I even think the total length of the six chapters is a very complete and satisfying experience. I wouldn’t want it to be longer as the impact would be lost in grind and filler. But the game is quite expensive, particularly for the playtime. The excellent physical presentation is a large part of that. This feels like a deluxe game with wonderful bits and visuals. It’s just important to realize you will likely only get several hours out of it, and then may never return. Some will be content to actually finish something they’ve started; others will balk at the cost and feel deflated. It’s something to contemplate.

Of greater concern – the game invites criticism by luring you in under false pretenses. There’s a sense of whiplash as your stomach and heart are torn to and fro. But I’m not sure it was the wrong decision. Yes, it inflicted unexpected misery and has left me somber, but the sheer impact is partially a result of subverting expectations. The manipulation is a significant tool in creating the emotional connection. And the attachment and lingering feelings are something I desperately seek in this hobby. It’s an elevation of these toys into art, and I’m here for it.

The larger criticism is a failure of coherently framing its central theme. I can’t touch on this without spoiling pretty much everything. So, that’s what I’m going to do.

THE SPOILER DMZ – ABANDON ALL HOPE, YE WHO ENTER HERE

The only substantive failing I’d attribute to Eila and Something Shiny is the obfuscation of its central theme of violence and the subsequent loss of humanity. The problem is that there are three possible endings to the game. Wonderful – replayability, right?

Well, no. Only a small percentage of entrants will replay the entire game. Even so, finding the highest level of success is extremely difficult and unlikely. The number of people achieving the best ending on their first playthrough will be miniscule.

In and of itself, that’s perfectly fine. However, in a baffling decision, the game’s core tenet is almost entirely hidden unless you complete the game the one true way. This results in a much longer ending, one where the story is clarified as existing in the subconscious of a girl who has been hospitalized in a coma after a car crash.

What?

Perhaps you could call it trite, but I actually found it both gripping and horrific. I’d paraphrase the motif as succumbing to violence results in a loss of one’s humanity. The game offers violent solutions to the various chapter problems, and indulging in such predilections ultimately twists Eila’s soul. Only through compassion can she awake from her slumber and find herself once again.

This was absolutely agonizing.

In 2017 my daughter, who was four years old at the time, was involved in a violent car accident. The hour between getting the phone call and getting to her side was the worst hour of my life. I was told second-hand that she wasn’t dead, but my family member didn’t know how bad she was hurt. When I first saw her, sitting in that hospital bed and covered in her own blood, I fell apart. Now, my stomach collapses on itself every time a family member calls me unexpectedly during the day.

She wasn’t in a coma. She escaped with stitches and scarring in several places on her head and face, and you’d barely notice now. But a game morphing from a cute little rabbit adventure to my failure resulting in Eila remaining in a coma? That left me numb.

Oddly, as I mentioned, you don’t even really understand this unless you just read all of the endings. I waited 24 hours, going back and forth on whether I wanted to spoil the other conclusions or replay the entire game. I gave in because the finale I experienced, the most common, was empty. It was brief and unsatisfying. I believe the intention is to entice you into beginning anew, but I wasn’t having it.

This is ineffectual storytelling. If you scrutinize the details and really pay attention to the foreshadowing, you can likely pick out the broad theme of condemning violence, but it’s easy to overlook, particularly when you’re caught up in disappointment and confusion. This really should have been tackled in another way.

I’m very torn on the game’s moral judgment of your actions. It feels contrived, as it goads you into violence in multiple instances, and then browbeats you for pursuing those solutions. 

Yet, from another perspective, I find it sort of brilliant. One of the thoughts that has stuck with me the past few days is how Eila and Something Shiny serves as a meta-commentary on the use of violence in games. I believe the game is criticizing the standard convention of brutality as a solution – really the only solution – in nearly every interactive medium. Video, roleplaying, and board games all. Traditional design pushes us towards our most animalistic and competitive nature by requiring we savagely beat another individual.

Initially, Eila feels the same. It allows you to escape from the pain and suffering at the hand of a group of bullies, and then it offers bonuses in subsequent combat. It all snowballs. Violence is the easy solution. The one we naturally gravitate towards. Jeffrey CCH leverages this.

From that higher angle, this serves as condemnation of conventional game design and the simplistic or non-existent essential moral framework in gaming. There’s a high ground here it wants you to take, one which many of us are blind to. I get the same sort of sensation I received when completing the immense video game Spec Ops: The Line. It goads you into your natural predatory tendencies and then spotlights your organic moral failings.

We haven’t really seen this style of narrative game on the tabletop. Something I’d associate with titles like Home, Dear Esther, and The Stanley Parable. I’m comfortable labelling it avant-garde. 

I could write about this game for days. How the tree and perhaps Leo represent Eila’s parents, who are clearly absent in the final scene at her bedside. How the entire subconscious journey mimics the path of life, from birth to emerging into the wider world, to forced servitude and ultimately finding an escape. I’ve even thought a lot about the comparisons between the something shiny and Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase. This game is dense, despite its unostentatious storytelling and light systems. It’s one that engages just as much post-play as it does during play.  

It’s a unique experience. A painful experience. I’m still somewhat off-kilter. It’s a bit of a bully and a deceiver at that. It didn’t make me feel well. But it did make me feel. That’s all I want, really.

 

A review copy of the game was provided by the publisher.

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