Éalú
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Genre: Adventure Developer & Publisher: Beyond The Bark Released: October 2, 2025 Requirements: OS: Windows 10 Processor: Minimum, Intel Atom X5-Z8350 4-core~1.44 Gh; Recommended, AMD Ryzen 3 3100 4-core~3.66Gh Memory: Minimum 4 GB RAM; Recommended, 16 GB RAM Graphics: Minimum, Nvidia GTX 750 1 GB GB/; Recommended, AMD RX550 2 GB Storage: 5 GB available space
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By flotsam Beyond The Bark Éalú means escape in the Irish language, something I didn't know when I came to the game, but which makes sense almost immediately. You are clearly in a maze, and the objective is presumably to escape. Or to find the way out/get to the end etc., which amounts to the same thing You are piloting a little wooden mechanical mouse, moving from room to room. Some rooms are just connective tissue, some contain puzzles, others contain clues and some deal death. Closed doors suggest a puzzle solve is required, and the clues need to be connected to the relevant puzzle. Which isn’t hard, but without them the puzzles will be way harder. Which requires you to explore thoroughly, and to map your exploits. Too many games use a maze as lazy filler. Here, the maze is the thing, a labyrinth you need to explore and decipher and unlock in order to escape. Each screen is a single room, and your perspective is generally side on from where the nearest wall would be, although it can at times be from higher up and even top down. To my recollection you never see the nearest wall and I thought it worked well, effectively putting you in the room with your wooden comrade. Mapping the maze is helped by it being divided into zones, different coloured floors and a change in the musical score indicating you have changed zones. The change makes no practical difference to the gameplay, but it did help me to feel that it wasn’t as big as it might otherwise have seemed and to reaffirm my bearings on occasion. And given you are a mouse, there is cheese. Which you can eat. To what end you can discover for yourself. I mentioned death, and you can indeed die. Not by simply entering a room, but by being inquisitive once in there. Should I spin that/turn that/pull that etc. A level of inquisitiveness is required, but I didn’t think it was unfair. There were things I didn’t push or pull, mainly because they looked like they might be trouble. There were some things I did poke because they seemed that they might be part of a solution, and occasionally just cos, and one room rather amusingly screamed don’t do this. If you do die, you will be resurrected back at your starting ‘mouse-house,’ and puzzles you have solved will need to be solved again in order to unlock the doors they relate to. So as well as mapping the maze, taking notes about your solutions is something you should do. If it sounds like starting again it really isn’t. You retain everything you know about the maze and what is where, along with what you did to solve any puzzle. Your notes and your map should ensure a relatively quick access back to where you met your demise from where you can move on. Apart from accessing the menu you only need the mouse. Don't be confused by the default cursor being an arrow (I was); the active cursor is a white circle and clicking will cause the mouse (literally and figuratively) to interact with the relevant hotspot. Wake up the mouse to start, then head off. The game exclusively saves automatically, but it occurs when you exit, so any time you want you can do a ‘manual’ save by exiting. You will always start in your mouse house, but things you have achieved will be as you left them. The soundtrack provides the only auditory input, there being no other sound. The different musical pieces didn’t really do it for me, but I left them turned on, albeit just barely, as a totally silent game didn’t do it for me either. The whole thing is stop-motion animation, which is an undeniable labour of love. According to the Steam page “every animation was captured via photography frame-by-frame using real sets, hand-crafted props, and a physical wooden mouse. Over 512 video clips were painstakingly made by a single animator — mostly in a garden shed — and brought to life by one developer carefully ensuring that each movement flowed into the next.” To paraphrase, four passionate people brought the whole thing to life. The painstaking nature of stop-motion animation is one reason I enjoy the format, along with the tactile-ness of the models involved. A game though still has to be worth playing. Which this one is. The makers say it will take 2 to 5 hours, and I reckon that’s right. I finished somewhere in between but only got 2 of the 6 achievements available and didn’t access at least one ‘restricted’ area. Which suggests there is more to find and to do. To summarise, Éalú is an engaging bit of puzzling, which is nothing I thought I would ever say about a maze. I played on: OS: Windows 11, 64 Bit Processor: Intel i7-9700K 3.7GHz RAM: Corsair Dominator Platinum RGB DDR4 32GB Video card: AMD Radeon RX 580 8192MB
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