Elea: Episode 1

There are few things that get me more excited than a great lost-in-space story, especially when it's one that prioritizes psychedelic visuals and a mind-scrambling narrative over the typical alien invasion nonsense. I think that's why I was drawn to Elea, a new episodic thriller set on a space station years after a pandemic as swept over Earth and doomed humanity. It's a setup so tantalizing that I was almost able to overlook the horrendous acting, shoddy execution and rampant bugs and glitches. Unfortunately, this game is a mess.

Elea sends us about a hundred years into the future, after a neurological mutation caused an uncontrollable rage in every Earth-born child. Fearing the worst, humanity came together to launch a first-of-its-kind interstellar expedition in order to find and colonize a new planet. And although it was successful in its mission, the people back on Earth haven't heard from them in thirteen years. This obviously troubles River, whose husband was one of the scientists on that first expedition. She's haunted by the unknown and will do just about anything to find out what happened, even if that means risking her life to travel to the planet on a rescue mission.

I make this setup sound pretty straight-forward, but the execution is anything but. From the psychedelic intro to the unreliable narrator, I knew I was in for a treat right from the opening moments. And if this game does anything well, it's disorient the player with one trippy event after another. It gets to the point where you don't always know what to believe, and in that sense it reminded me a lot of the 1971 Tarkovsky masterpiece Solaris.

This is the first of three proposed episodes, so it mostly deals with the setup and characters. We see River at varying points in her life, which helps to give us some context and introduce mysteries that will surely be paid off in future installments. Most of the episode takes place searching the four floors of the space station. There aren't a lot of scares here, but there is some real tension when we start to figure out what her end goal is. As first episodes go, this one made me excited to see what happens next.

But here's the thing, there are a lot of problems that will need to be addressed with this game before episode 2 shows up. I'm not sure if there's a polite way to say it, but this game is busted. It feels like every part of it is being held together by scotch tape and staples. I ran into rampant frame rate and technical problems, as well as points where you'll get stuck to the floor. This happened repeatedly as I tried to put on a helmet, which is kind of important if you want to complete the episode.

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And it's not just getting stuck that you have to worry about, because Elea will occasionally make puzzles impossible to solve. For some strange reason the game has a hard time generating the image of the item you pick up. As a result, you won't be able to see the code you need or necessary email. And the problem is that it's not always clear that something is wrong. It wasn't until I restarted the game that I realized that I had missed entire clues due to these bugs.

Speaking of which, I quickly discovered that reloading the game was a pain because of the awful checkpointing. There's no way to manually save your progress, so I assumed the checkpoints would be close together. But that's not the case here, as I had to do five or ten minutes of backtracking every time I died or restarted. This isn't so bad for most of the game, since it's fairly easy and you probably won't die, but there's a bit towards the end that is absolutely miserable. It's a high-speed chase where anything and everything can go wrong. I died because I didn't know where I was supposed to be going; I died because the run button stopped working; I died when somebody walked up behind me. And all this was made worse by knowing that every time I died, I would need to put on the space suit again, solve the door puzzle, jump down the shaft, crawl through the ventilation and then try that run all over again.

And then there's the bad voice acting. To be fair to Elea, the person playing the title character does a fine job. She's not great and doesn't show much range, but appears to know her lines and what emotion she's trying to convey. That's a lot more than I can say about the rest of the cast, all of whom have thick accents and monotone performances. The game will occasionally turn down the other voices in hopes you won't notice the painful delivery, but you'll notice. It's real obvious.

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There are times when I think this game looks stunning. The early stuff with the weird and psychedelic imagery really worked for me, and some of the ship designs are cool. The problem is that the graphics are inconsistent from one moment to another. It has a really aggressive focus that blurs everything else out, but that often leads to a lot of times where you'll walk around like you're drunk. This is the kind of game that looks better in screenshots than in action.

From a storytelling perspective, I'm excited to see where Elea takes me. There's nothing necessarily new or unique about this setup, but the cliffhanger is compelling enough to make me want to come back. That said, if this series is going to make it to episode three, then it's going to need to focus on a lot of the technical problems. This is a game plagued with rampant game-breaking bugs, terrible voice acting and bad checkpointing. This is an expedition with a lot of potential, but in its current state it's lost in space in more ways than one.