Chapter 0: Sleeping Gods
This article will contain spoilers for the board game Eila and Something Shiny. If you don’t care, don’t know what that is, or want to save $65, read on.
Earlier this year, I wrote a critical review of Sleeping Gods. I enjoyed the exploration but found everything else tedious. From this experience, I argued that storytelling games should try to eliminate the upkeep and focus on the story. If you want to make a game about discovery and drama, let me get to the discovery and drama.
That leads me to Eila and Something Shiny. Eila also removes much of the upkeep or endless skill checks that one would find in a game like Sleeping Gods or $5,000 Kickstarter projects. Various reviewers also promised that the game explores adult themes, despite its cute art style. Here, you draw a card and choose one of the (usually two) options on the card. That’s it. There’s no atlas, no special combat puzzle, and no book listing hundreds of possible encounters.
Before revealing my thoughts, I’ll explain how Eila plays, and how its story emerges from its mechanics.
Chapter 1: The Gameplay Loop
On each turn, you draw a card from the card stand and choose one of the (usually two) options. That’s pretty much the only way you’ll interact with the game. The cards look like this:
After making your selection, you’ll resolve the chosen effect Part of this effect includes placing the card into either the “past” or “future” pile. Once you’ve drawn every card in your card stack, you shuffle the cards in the future pile, put them in the stand, and start the next round. If a card heads into the past pile, you won’t see it again. Each of the game’s six chapters (confusingly numbered 0-5) lasts up to 7 rounds. A loss occurs if you run out of health (some cards will force you to take damage) or fail to accomplish the mission after 7 rounds. You succeed and move to the next chapter by obtaining a certain number of resources or finding an alternative ending through the cards.
This simple system allows for the game’s storytelling and discovery to emerge. Some cards concern resources, while others add additional cards to the game. Maybe you can choose between getting a couple of food tokens or uncovering a new location. If you select the latter, the game may say “add card 207” to your future deck. In later rounds, you’ll see a card representing that location. Other times, an option will immediately activate another card. You might choose to turn over a rock, knowing it will put card 235 up next. Then, you flip card 235 to find a gross scary monster. If you defeat the monster, it heads into your past pile, never to be seen again. If you run away, it returns to the future pile for an inevitable clash in future rounds. Since these added cards can themselves add more cards, the basic “choose A or B” procedure allows for more complex strategies and narratives.
Turn-to-turn, Eila amounts to a resource conversion game. The board features an eight-slot inventory for physical items: food, money, and the significantly rarer “special” item. It contains another eight slots for mental items: energy, knowledge, and fear. The last one, fear, acts a bit differently. Players never benefit from fear, and it can’t be spent or traded like the other five. Instead, it merely clogs up space in the mental inventory, preventing players from gaining energy and knowledge. The tactics involve choosing which resources to obtain, which to convert, how to convert them, and deciding when to remove skulls.
And I like it! There’s nothing I enjoy more in life than turning wooden pieces of one color into wooden pieces of another. That’s pure bliss. However, I wish they did a little bit more to mitigate randomness. For example, imagine that Card X gains you 3 food while Card Y turns 3 food into 3 knowledge. If the cards arrive in that order, you guarantee yourself three pieces of knowledge. If they don’t, they no longer synergize. The game should have added some “place in the back of the stack” mechanic to avoid this. Maybe you could put it back upside down to mark that you’ve used the “back of stack” option. It’s not a big deal, though, and I enjoy the gameplay.
Finally, the cards often allow you to interact with additional sets of components. In Chapter 3, you’ll draw cards that allow you to move through a 6x6 grid set up on the right side of the table. Chapter 2, meanwhile, features pop quizzes that reward those who pay attention to the card art. Eila never goes too crazy with any of this, but it’s nice to see the game add new playstyles without altering the basic mechanisms.
In summary, players will find a simple mechanism that branches into infinite opportunities, a solid resource conversion system, and some creative flair in the later chapters. I even enjoy the aesthetic and art! So, do I love the game? Well…
Chapter 2: The Plot Twist
In Eila and Something Shiny, you play as a cartoon bunny (Eila) searching for the shiny summit of a nearby mountain. The game takes place in a fantasy world with talking animals, magic spells, and grotesque monsters. Words can only do so much, so let me share some photos to give you a sense of this world:
The game takes place over six chapters (labeled 0-5). Each chapter (except 0) contains multiple little comics. You begin each one with a “Prologue” comic that sets up the scenario and any starting resource conditions. If you complete a mission, you then find the corresponding “Ending” comic that tells you how Eila escaped her predictament. Players only move to the next chapter if they win (it’s not a “fail forward” game), and there is no penalty for failing a chapter. If you lose, keep playing until you win.
Chapters 0 and 1 set an innocuous stage. Eila befriends a talking tree, and this tree helps her begin the trek to the “something shiny” off in the distance. The story takes a dark turn thereafter. In Chapter 2, Eila finds herself in a brutal prison factory. She must work (or fight) or way to freedom. Doing so sends her and a friend to Chapter 3’s underground mine, where they must escape by stealing or forging a key. In Chapter 4, the player heads to the castle. Here, the player must escape or buy their freedom from the greedy king. Chapter 5 features the final confrontation with the titular Something Shiny.
At the summit of Chapter 5’s mountain, you’ll encounter a series of difficult battles. I’m gonna be honest, here, guys. I found this impossible, so I cheated and pretended I won every battle to see the end of the story. Tom Vasel did the same with his daughters, so I don’t feel quite as bad.
At the end of chapter 5, you’ll find three possible endings. In the first two endings, Eila faces an evil shadowy version of herself. Evil Shadow Guy says that you were too violent and mean, so you have to replay the game from the start to find the true ending. At this point, any normal person says “hard pass” and looks up the game’s true ending.
Ending C congratulates you for taking a non-violent route through the entire game. In celebration, the game tells you to dig out a hidden comic book from the bottom of the box. I love this! When opening the game, you might think you reached the bottom of the box. However, the publisher lined the bottom with a cardboard-colored sheet. By removing this, you’ll find a larger comic book showcasing the game’s true conclusion.
Are you ready for this? Remember everything I’ve told you about? The cute rabbit, the prison factory, the mine, monsters, the greedy king, the spells, the companion, the talking tree. It’s all fake. This game does not take place in a fantasy world akin to Lord of the Rings. This whole thing took place inside of a human girl’s head. She found herself in a coma following a car accident. The rabbit, Eila, appears to be some sort of cartoon character. After reaching the fictional shiny summit, the game praises you for “choosing kindness” and the girl awakes from her coma.
To which I say… what?????????
Reviewers praised this game as mature for tackling adult themes. In any actually mature medium, however, everyone hates “it’s all a dream” endings. It’s a lazy cop-out. It’s also not representative of how dreams work. Dreams are incoherent, jumbled messes. That’s why David Lynch movies like Mulholland Dr or Erasherhead best capture the concept of dreams and nightmares. Scenes in these films often feel out-of-place or nonsensical, because that’s how dream narratives work.
Even within the “it’s all a dream” framework, this doesn’t make much sense. Board game critic Dan Thurot connects it to his LDS upbringing:
Because, in the end, it turns out that Eila’s suffering is that of a child wrestling with a coma. But there are multiple endings. Three, to be precise. The first two are dark and despairing, with Eila the rabbit stuffy succumbing to the beastly part of her nature. Because she has not been kind — a rather fraught proposition in some of this game’s scenarios, especially when “kindness” requires that you not fight back against a gang of prison inmates — because she has not been kind, she is swallowed by a shadow that pits fanged mouths in her ears and black coals in her eye sockets. But if she has been a good girl, and done everything right, she is rewarded. She cracks her eyelids, Eila the girl, in her hospital bed. Through her goodness, she is saved.
Again, this speaks volumes of me as a person experiencing this work of art, but I fear it taps into something more universal than my own hangups. I remember as a child hearing somebody say that my younger sister had been cursed with type-1 diabetes because of something she had done in her premortal life, and that she could be healed if she had enough faith. She was four years old. Four goddamned years old. Too young to be baptized or considered morally accountable in the Mormon tradition, and already rotten with imagined sin. I remember being a Mormon missionary and being sick and depressed and choked with doubt, and a know-it-all sister missionary loudly boasting that physical health was connected to spiritual health, and that’s why she had yet to fall seriously ill.
That’s heavy stuff, and I’m glad Thurot found some personal connection to the game. Unfortunately, he might give Eila too much credit. The game never argues that she ought to stay in the coma until she plays nice in fantasy land. In fact, it never attempts to connect the magic world to her coma-awakening. To put it bluntly, it just makes no sense. There is no reason why nice play should be required to awaken her.
Hence, Eila features a cliche “all a dream” ending with a message of “be nice.” And that “be nice” ought to extend, as Thurot notes, to gangs that attack you and your friends. This is supposed to represent some sort of maturity for the medium.
I have a couple more issues with how the game approaches storytelling. You’ll see 1-3 endings for each chapter, but only one prologue. In other words, no matter what you do, you’re always going to start each chapter the same way. Secondly, the game doesn’t always force you to confront these decisions. Recall that Chapter 2 involves the factory with the evil boss. Eila can work her way out or she can sneak out by beating up the prison gang. I completed it in the standard way, and I didn’t even know about the violent option. The game therefore praised my ignorance as kindness. I didn’t even check what the “evil” endings were for Chapter 4. Most importantly, a lot of these “decisions” come via my least favorite mechanism in the game.
Chapter 3: The Action Scene
The game comes with dice.
At various times throughout the game, you’ll find “combat” cards. When drawing these you roll one or two dice (depending on if your companion sticks around). You’ll then have the opportunity to modify these dice with items, spells, and energy tokens. The system works fine. It encourages exploration, as you’ll need modifiers to win the more difficult fights. It also resolved quickly. You won’t find the twenty-minute brain burners that I complained about in Sleeping Gods.
But… it’s still too much. I see two issues with the combat system. First, it undermines the storytelling aspect of the. As discussed in the last section, the designer wants you to be a nice bunny girl. You can satisfy that by choosing the pacifistic routes. You can also do so by getting bad luck on the dice rolls. I don’t want to sound like an anti-randomness guy. Some of my favorite games, including Roll Player and Castles of Burgundy, feature heavy use of dice rolls. The excellent Super Skill Pinball series features little more than dice randomness. The difference is that Super Skill Pinball attempts to emulate a wacky pinball machine. That game should be pretty random! Eila, on the other hand, wants you to suffer the consequences of your decisions. That doesn’t work if you’re decisions stem from dice rolls.
My second problem with combat is that’s boring and overdone. Earlier in the year, I completed an enjoyable playthrough of the video game Bug Fables. I planned to write an article about it, but I scrapped it after realizing I lacked an interesting angle. However, I think that the lost article made one good point that applies here. Every level in that game includes both a midway boss and a final boss, not to mention a million random counters before each. The combat system is half that game’s appeal, so I’m not asking for a pacifistic route. I just think the designers could have displayed a bit more creativity in how to transverse through the plot.
The same applies to Eila. Did we need combat? I can think of some alternatives. Remember the factory in Chapter 2? You can either work your way out or beat up the prison gang. Here’s an alternative: you can liberate yourself by working legitimately or by sabotaging your friendly co-workers. Chapter 3 lets you escape the mine by fighting for a key or forging one with metal. Instead, maybe you can forge one with expensive resources you find at various stores, or forge one by stealing a cheap resource from some poor, indigenous inhabitants. That leaves the morality system intact while removing the unthematic dice rolls.
Chapter 4: Klaus and Something Compelling
It’s always easier to criticize than create. In this last section, I’ll suggest changes that would have improved this experience. Eila features some great systems and creative ideas, and I would love to see the designers take a second crack at this concept.
One: Remove the jarring plot twist
When players open the box, make the true story explicit. Tell them they’re a girl in a coma, and present the game as a quest to return her to the physical world. This adds stakes to the game and removes the cheap feeling I got after reading the finale. A talented writer could use the mythical worlds as an exploration into girl’s relationships with her friends and parents.
Two: Choices Should be Choices
Again, when I completed the factory chapter in the “good” way, I didn’t see the alternatives. Each chapter should begin by explaining the ways out. For example, the factory prologue could feature Eila speaking with a co-worker. This co-worker could hint toward the violent route. Maybe it only explains two of the three in later sections, so that some parts of the game can be left as a surprise. Having one prologue for each chapter is also disappointing. The writers could probably give us a Chapter 4A and 4B prologue, which starts the story differently depending upon our previous actions.
Three: Combat
Get rid of it! If you absolutely must throw a giant spider at the player, use the combat system of Lost Ruins of Arnak. That game, like Eila, mostly involves converting resources. How do you fight monsters? You convert resources! Does it make sense why you need one coin and two tablets to defeat a giant snake? Nope, but it keeps the gameplay cohesive.
Four: All Good Endings
I don’t quite understand why this game, or similar ones, needs a “bad” ending. Each chapter contains two failure conditions. Aren’t those, in some sense, the “bad endings?” If you fail to escape the mine or the castle, you’ll never find the shiny summit. Do we need a super-duper-fail at the end of the game? Take your average Mario game. Upon reaching the game over the screen, you have, presumably, failed to rescue Princess Peach. That’s a bad ending, so you want to try again. Should these games add an even worse ending? You defeated Bowser and rescued Peach… but you killed too many Goombas so now Peach becomes an evil tyrant that oppresses the Mushroom Kingdom. Do we need that? I think I’m good with the credits rolling.
If Eila needs multiple endings, I agree with Ulton’s analysis. It’s pretty messed up for a girl to get stuck in a coma because she hurt talking animals in a fantasy world. Maybe the two endings could work like this. If you play the moral way, the girl wakes up and excitedly tells her parents about her adventure in this fantasy world. If you go John Wick Mode, she tells her mom that she’d rather not talk about it. That would hit two different emotional notes without keeping her comatose.