Our Verdict
The Star Named EOS offers a lovely experience filled with puzzles of differing difficulty, on a background of hand-painted art and a delightful piano-filled soundtrack.
The Star Named EOS follows Dei as they look through photos sent by their mother in letters while she traveled, and piece together a journey by recreating her shots. You work through different settings and complete little puzzles to find patterns and codes and uncover hidden items in order to progress.
However, not everything is as it seems – a book may lay out your path, or perhaps a code lies in wait for you as you look around a room. That’s about as much as I can say without being too specific and giving away any solutions, honestly, but remember to look at everything and fully explore your environment.
There’s a nice mix of puzzles here, some are simple to solve and others will have you reaching for a notepad and scratching your head. A couple did admittedly get me very confused but enough thinking and puzzling and the solution came to me. That, or I stopped being a silly goose and used what was in front of me.
That said, there’s no help if you do get stuck. A similar point-and-click title The Room had clues available, and Paper Trail even had solutions if you get stuck to show you how to progress by folding the paper.
The Star Named EOS unfortunately doesn’t have any hints, clues, or solutions in the game. As someone who loves the idea of puzzle games but always ends up getting stuck and stressed (a me problem, for sure), I’d like to see even the tiniest hint like a teeny-weeny glimmer on an object you should look at, or which direction you should turn, for instance.
While figuring my way through different scenarios, I also noticed that you can use the Switch’s touch controls while in the puzzle itself, but not to look around the room or enter into the specific puzzle’s zoomed-in view. A lot of games do this, and I always wonder why it isn’t fully touchscreen, especially when the Switch’s controls are sometimes a bit iffy.
The game is also truly beautiful thanks to the hand-drawn scenery and animated scenes, with enough detail to catch your eye even in the dark corners of every setting. You may recognize the artwork from Silver Lining Studios’ previous title, Behind the Frame, a similarly hand-drawn puzzle game that passes on its looks and style to EOS. The games don’t appear to be related in terms of story, however.
Coupled with this is full voice acting by Suzie Yeung (known for Honkai Star Rail’s Hanya and Genshin Impact’s Eula) to narrate the experience, and a very nice soundtrack reminiscent of the piano ballads in Genshin Impact’s Liyue area, mixed with a bit of Sims 4’s merry melodies too. By the way, you can get the soundtrack at launch, which I highly recommend as it’s lovely and emotive.
Silver Lining Studios’ heart-warming puzzler runs well on the Switch, with minimal load times and no hang-ups. However, I did get stuck on a screen after completing a particular conundrum as the button to exit the area did not appear until after I’d restarted the game. Thankfully it automatically saves, so nothing was lost, but it was a little inconvenient.
Either way, I did have a nice time with The Star Named EOS. Better puzzle solvers than me will surely have even more of a wonderful time, but the story is intriguing and deeper than you think, making you want to progress to the next scenario and discover more.
If this has you intrigued, we can recommend some similar hidden object games on the Switch, along with point-and-click games that may be right up your alley.