Artefix Mundi has been quick to port over all of their previous PC releases to Xbox One. The last time I reviewed one of their point and click adventures, I gave it a very middling score. My major complaints were that the game’s cinematics chugged harder than a freshman at a frat party, and the screen would tear wildly when I switched between scenes. Eventide: Slavic Fable fixes these problems while creating some new ones of its own.
Eventide, just like all the Artifex Mundi games that came before it, is beautiful. No one looking at the art design, color pallet, and various set pieces could find issue with the look of the game. Each scene is like a painting hung in a rustic castle or a mural left on the wall of Hogwarts. The scenes flow, making the world a pleasure to be a part of.
Too bad this world is extremely short. This is by far the shortest game released by this development house. I was able to complete the entire game, including the extra chapter, in just over 2 hours. That is without any hints or walkthroughs. The game has very few picture search puzzles in comparison to their other games, and has a few extra combination-based puzzles. The combo puzzles are very easy as long as all of the materials are collected beforehand.
In other games, there was a second way to solve puzzles. When a puzzle was too hard to solve, instead of using a hint, I could opt to solve the puzzle by completing a tile game. Various iterations had a tile game that played like dominoes, and another one played like mahjong. Eventide decided to skip the tile game in order to allow the player to skip the puzzle.
I always feel that if a game allows the player to skip a part of the game, then the developer is basically saying that the skippable part of the game is not worth paying attention to. Considering that the only gameplay in this game is the puzzles, that is a very troubling aspect. Forcing the player to persevere and work through the puzzles is a much better option to ensuring the user sees what the developer intends them to see.
Eventide fixed a lot of the framerate issues that previous games had. Moving from scene to scene was void of any noticeable lag. The cutscenes also ran a lot smoother, but still had the characteristically slow movement. I also did not notice the strange vibration glitch that I saw in Nightmares from the Deep 2. A click on the wrong item would only create a slight buzz in the controller, unlike the 2 or 3 second attack that Nightmares gave me. I am very thankful for this change.
The story of Eventide is mostly forgettable. After only being a day removed from the game, I cannot recall the name of the main character or the overall goal of the game. I remember some of the large plot points and some of the large set pieces, but the narrative is lost to me. I know that games like these usually have only enough thread to weave all the puzzles together, but this story was unusually shallow. I was excited when I heard my character talk, as some of the other protagonists have been silent. But soon after, I zoned out while playing and lost most of the story.
Summary
While Artifex Mundi has fixed some of the most glaring issues of previously released titles, Eventide still misses the one key element that can take it to the next level: characters and stories. Eventide is fun, but mostly forgettable, with little to no replayability. I really hope that the next release is more substantial, filled with extra exciting puzzles and a narrative worth my time.
Joshua was a regular ICXM contributor between 2016–2017, publishing 42 articles across game reviews, and Xbox news. Their work focused on hands-on reviews, platform commentary, and breaking-news reporting during the Xbox One X launch year and Microsoft’s wider Play Anywhere / UWP gaming initiative.