One Step From Eden

Really have to say this one was fantastic and my favourite game of the year so far! The more you play, the more addictive it becomes!

I’m not big on scores, but i figure, why not, so i give this one 9/10! You can check out the video review below.

One Step From Eden

I’m going to throw this one out right from the start, everything about the design of one step from eden makes it a game that i should hate! There’s the deck building aspect, never been a huge fan of that, and the ridiculously fast paced action that makes your fingers go numb, well i’m pretty terrible at that as well, and yet despite this, One Step From Eden Turns out to be about the most addictive, hard to play indie games i’ve tried out in a long while. 

I’m going to assume that you’ve never heard of One Step From Eden, or know a few details about it and give a bit of explanation. It’s said to be heavily inspired by Mega Man Battle Network, games I honestly have not played myself, so i’ll take everyone else’s word for it. What i can say is that it brings together a tactical game with a large depth of mechanics that is still enjoyable for someone who is pretty hopeless at that side of things. 

One Step From Eden is all about your battlefield that all the action takes place on. 16 tiles for you to work your way across, and 16 for your enemy to spend most of their time, although i have to say some of your abilities allow you to temporarily slash over to their side, and some of the enemies seem to not care at all about whose half it is, and just wander on over the try and kill you. You survive, or win the stage by taking out all the enemies before they get your health points down to zero, and your reward for each stage victory is a selection of cards to choose to add to your deck. Leveling up brings artifacts that give permanent or temporary awards and you have the ability to purchase and level up different cards and artifacts if choose to travel along a path that has the shop icon present. 

It’s pretty standard for card based roguelikes here. Your strategy is to choose along the way what kind of deck you want to build, and try to optimise and choose cards that fit into that domain. I really am drawn towards using fire, and shield cards and this is something you can utilise by choosing these kind types (phalanx and anima) as your focus for the round. I was a bit lost on my early runs and went searching for some advice about how to play more effectively, and one tip I found on reddit from the devs was to know when to skip choosing a card, to avoid overcrowding your deck. This really helped me out as intuitively knowing what your spells are going to do without having to pay more attention to them than the icon, is going to be very important in making it through some of the hard rounds. 

One step from eden plays well and you will have no issues with the controls, perhaps beyond the sore thumbs that I get from the boss battle, and there’s no mechanics or bugs that scream broken game, so all that side of it is ticking boxes for a newly released game. So what makes this game so good? Let’s jump into that. 

The simplicity of the difficulty in one step from eden is awesome, and it allows you to have a full feeling of progression as you make it through parts of the levels that had seemed impossible earlier. I should mention here that I’m by no means approaching this as an expert, I have spent the majority of my time with the game getting destroyed, and have only manage to unlock 2 extra characters so far without a single victory. But boy, unlocking those 2 after hours of struggle was such a good feeling, and managing to do so with a 1hp victory, whilst Hazel was in their finishing animation, well that made it ever the more sweet. There are still parts of the early game that i find more difficult, and i cringe thinking about each time Selicy kicked my butt with his ice spears, but i can already feel that i’m getting much better, and things like reaction speed and knowledge of spells and deck paths are starting to shine through. 

Talking of the character, or the boss levels, they are each so unique and interesting with different attack patterns that make the fights so enjoyable. Unless you have much better reactions and mechanics than me, you need to study their patterns and this takes a few defeats to get the handle of, but I can definitely say I like the different styles of each fight that make them feel so different. Violette’s music and rhythm battle is a great example of this, and even though selicy destroyed me early, I actually don’t mind facing off against them now that i’ve memorised most of his patterns. 

The amount of hours i’ve thrown into One Step From Eden in such a short time is testament to how good of a game it is, and this is mostly all through playing Saffron. As you defeat some of the bosses at laters levels you get the ability to take them through the levels and they just play so differently and uniquely that I could easily see people dropping 10s if not 100s of hours into this game without even realising!