Watch your step while exploring the beauty of Esothe
It's probably because she's wearing those heels
Exploring a bunch of ruins for mysterious glowing orbs is dangerous, it turns out, even if there are no monsters or even other people around. Esothe is primarily a game about exploring a world full of gorgeous ruins, but there’s plenty of places you might take a tumble and be greeted by a sickening crunch. When you’re mostly used to hearing birdsong and silence, that can be quite a shock.
The occasional fatal slip is worth it, though, because you’ll want to see everything (except maybe the giant spiders). To me, being outside is where it’s prettiest, with the horizon devolving into painterly abstractedness. But the underground rivers and cluttered house provide a welcome break, and more importantly make the outside look all the better when you emerge again. There is a plot, about finding those aforementioned orbs and putting them into a strange contraption in the middle of the plain, but it's more an excuse to push you to look around than anything else. Which is fine by me.
The 20-30 minute runtime is the work of a single developer, mort-art, who put it together in a month. Now that it’s in the wild, they’re both updating what’s there with minor bugfixes and, if the “to be continued” note is anything to go by, thinking about expanding it into something longer.
I could definitely spend more time wandering around the grasslands and ancient halls of this place. Though I’d be more careful to watch my step than I was this time. That crunch really is something.
You can download Esothe for pay what you want on itch.io.