I like to keep things relatively fresh here on Indie Game of the Week, checking out any new developers or notable deviations to the usual formulae that fall into my lap, but some entries are as predictable as they are inevitable. After all, I've already covered the first two games in Basilisk Games's series of throwback top-down, single-character RPGs with reviews for Eschalon: Book I (IGotW #66) and Eschalon: Book II (IGotW #116) so it was only a matter of time until I came back for the trilogy's finale. Eschalon: Book III picks up immediately after the second game, and true to the franchise's conceit of an amnesiac hero - a hero that wiped their own brain, it was revealed last game, as the series antagonist is capable of reading minds - you are once again bereft of your skills and most of your memories after teleporting half a continent away in a magical explosion. This is of course a justification for creating a whole new character each game and having various recurring NPCs being very patient when explaining the plot thus far to you, which I appreciate as someone who last played this series two years ago.

In case you're new here, Eschalon is a trilogy of RPGs that hearkens back to the era of Ultima and the many imitators it spawned with its general interface and perspective, but also shares a significant amount of DNA with a Bethesda RPG (e.g. Skyrim) or one of Piranha Bytes's affairs (e.g. Risen): you have a single character which you can spec in any number of directions despite committing to a character class and stat arrangement during creation. Since you gain skill points and attribute points every level, you could theoretically come up with any kind of combination of fighter, thief, mage, cleric, or ranger to suit your playstyle, and the skill system is robust enough to have an assortment of "utility" skills that are of benefit to any class construct for which you eventually opt. Class-specific skills might include mastery of seven different types of weapon (piercing, cleaving, blunt, swords, axes, bows, unarmed), three types of armor (light, heavy, shields), two spell schools (divination/healing, elemental/invocation), and four thief skills (move silently, pick locks, hide in shadows, and skulduggery i.e. disarming traps). Utility skills include Cartography, which you need for the mini-map to work (and it gets increasingly more detailed the more points you spend in the skill), Mercantile (better prices), Lore (can identify valuable items), Repair (fix your own stuff), Medicine (higher HP regen), Meditation (higher MP regen), and Alchemy (craft your own potions). Some skills have proven more useful than others - I'm rocking a monk-like build with points in unarmed, light armor, medicine, and dodge; the last of which occasionally lets me avoid damage entirely and throws off the enemy for a counter blow - but it's relatively easy to acquire new skills and figure out how far you want to develop them. One slight hurdle to this system is that new skills take three building points to learn to get them to level 1 (where each subsequent level is just one point), so it seems like you're often better off finishing the character creation process with a few focused skills and learning new ones from skill books and NPC trainers instead.

Right from the word go, Eschalon: Book III reminded me just how wild the overarching story has become. I'll give it a quick spoiler-blocked synopsis below, but suffice it to say as the last "book" of a trilogy we're moving towards a climactic endgame after several sudden twists and revelations about the world and ourselves. It should probably also go without saying that Book III might not be the ideal place to break into this series, though it's certainly built in such a way - the aforementioned brain wipe - that it's not impossible.

As is the case with many RPGs, you're given a series of main quest objectives and left to your own devices for the gaps in-between, completing side-quests for necessary XP and resources - the game is one of those where you gain a relatively small amount of XP for kills and the majority for completing quests, in part because a pacifist run is one of the viable challenges you can pursue - or going off and exploring the world for secret areas (also a lot of XP and treasure) and other incidental mayhem and riches. Eschalon: Book III, for one reason or another, is quite a bit shorter than the previous two; I ascertained this just from looking at the world map, though it was corroborated by non-spoilery information sources like Steam reviews and its runtime on "HowLongToBeat", which suggests the developers either ran out of time and/or money or couldn't figure out a way to organically stretch out the remaining story they had prepared (no stuffing the exciting conclusive chapter with aimless filler, in other words). I've yet to decide if this shorter runtime is necessarily a detriment: I'm all for more concision in my RPGs with the backlog I'm swinging around, but the character development in previous Eschalon games only hit its stride towards the late-game when you have enough resources to spec towards a preferred build and a truncated version of that process might see you end with a character who still doesn't feel powerful enough unless there's a huge amount of XP gains towards the end to compensate (in which case, it'll feel slightly disjointed). I'll hit you all with a post-script once I'm done with the game - I'm about halfway through right now, if I had to guess - to let you know how that goes.

Worth pointing out that the game is built for replays with challenges like the pacifist run I mentioned earlier. The game has an adjustable difficulty - you can opt for hunger/thirst mechanics, equipment durability, restricted saving (can't save when there's an enemy nearby or you have poison/disease/low HP), and fixed success/failure rates for skill checks like lockpicking (so no save-scumming for a better result, though you can take another shot once you've improved the applicable skill) or none of the above - and there's an in-game list of challenges that you can try to fulfill, which in addition to pacifism also includes class-specific ones (the "true thief" challenge requires never setting off a trap involuntarily, and "true healer" means never seeking external healing from NPCs) or milestones like finishing the game with a certain amount of cash or kills. The only benefit these conditional modifiers provide is a percentage boost to your final score, but if you're the competitive type you can mix and match your own arduous requisites for a subsequent end-game results screen more conducive to bragging rights.

For the time being, I'm enjoying Eschalon: Book III about as much as I did the previous two. Despite being functionally open-world the game gives you a relatively tight leash with regards to what you can do and where you can go, and every battle early on is so hard-fought that you're really risking life and limb with any deviation from the main quest path, but it's starting to open up a bit now and my character build is coming together in a satisfying way. I've just bought a pretty strong weapon - while I am going for an unarmed fighter, you can purchase knuckle-dusters to augment your damage output - and my dodge skill is getting high enough to be semi-reliable, though I'm still getting clobbered by a lot of enemies without a better healing solution than "wait until I regen it all back naturally." I've got a grip of side-quests to be following up on after finding both of the major population centers of this particular landmass, so it's a matter of prioritizing (or figuring out, even) the ones that I can do now and working my way up to the harder targets, which so far has meant wandering into a new area and determining if everything is killing me too fast. I've always kinda liked this "checking the temperature" approach to open-world RPG encounter design though, as evinced by my regular Gothic playthroughs, so I'm having fun even when I'm being thrown across the room by a frog humanoid or turned to stone by a surprise basilisk. Certainly beats having everything scaled to my level wherever I go, which robs a world of its unexpected dangers. These throwback RPGs aren't going to be for everyone but I've found the Eschalon series to be smartly compact adventures that get to the heart of what makes western-style RPGs compelling: a sense of wanderlust, loot that matters, and a genuine sense of constant improvement.

Rating: 4 out of 5.

Post-Script: Well... a half-hearted shrug is definitely one way to end a trilogy of epic RPGs. It worked for BioWare I suppose. Eschalon: Book III proceeded much like I expected to, with an uncommon approach to world design that sort of works: you can see by the map up there that the eastern mountains creates a barrier early on: you actually start at the bottom (Weeping Mountain), make your way north (Rockhammer), then west (the Boglands, Baasilt, Elderoak, and the town of Moonrise) before heading back through Rockhammer via the southern beach of Deadman's Strand, then up the east coast to the Astral Range where the game ends. The game corrals you to Moonrise first to establish a decent hub, then powers you up with main and side-quests so you can survive the perilous trip to the east coast. As you head up the coast, you unlock shortcuts back (but Macross also has vendors, if the need arises; sure beats the giant mech suits I was expecting). Like starting in the center of a spiral and moving outwards, almost.

I also anticipated that the power creep would be interrupted by an abrupt ending, but you actually get reasonably powerful by the end. That also means a baptism of fire approach: each new region's enemies are considerably stronger than you are, so in the late game you're often finding reasons to sneak by everything if you're not some martial powerhouse or a mage that can fry things from a hundred yards away. Acquiring a combat feat after enough levels in Unarmed meant I could hit an enemy extremely hard and then run away until the feat cooldown ended; not the most elegant approach, but it worked wonders in the outdoors where there was plenty of space to use. I only found trainers for half the game's skills though: I think you can learn all of them from trainers or books, but some are evidently harder to increase than others. You want to know beforehand what trainers upgrade which skills, because that dictates what you focus your level up points on - if I can spend a small amount of money learning the cheaper first few levels of a skill, I'd rather do that than invest level-up points into them (and then dedicate those points into skills with no trainers).

But let's address that ending in brief (spoiler warning, since I can't spoiler-block things in this quote format). It essentially ends with a Morton's fork of a binary decision, based on who you trust more out of two major NPCs who have been jerking you around the whole series, and both choices seem to lead to the deaths of almost every living thing on the planet. The hero gets so disillusioned by the outcome that he/she doesn't even stick around for their reward; they just walk off and contemplate buying a ship and seeing the rest of the world before it's gone. Kinda grim, but I can at least respect the author for settling on a downer ending, even if it kinda puts all your heroism and accomplishments in a nihilistic "what did it even matter?" light. (But hey, apt enough for 2021.)