Erenshor: The Shivering Steps

I’ve talked before about Erenshor, the single player RPG that pretends to be a full MMO with a large assortment of characters who will chat with each other in the group and also anyone else who happens to be in the zone, demand to roll for loot and so on. It’s EverQuest if the perfect group was just always available and wanted to do anything you wanted to do. And when you aren’t grouping with them, they are fine to go off and level and gear up on their own.

It’s a refreshing take on RPGs; I don’t think I’ve played many MMO simulators since the .hack/GU PlayStation games (which included additional things to do when you weren’t logged in to The World). But unlike the .hack games, the other “players” in Erenshor don’t talk at all about their offline lives. They’re here to party. Up. Party up. With you.

The game is still very much a work in progress, but there is a demo that takes you through the tutorial island and lets you earn a basic set of gear. For a few weeks only, Erenshor is offering a Halloween-themed bonus section that takes you into a mirror, haunted version of the Stowaway’s Step starter zone. The tutorial zone brings you up to level 6; Shivering Steps brings you through to level 12, and gives you decent class-specific weapons, armor and trinkets which should, when the games goes live, let you speed through the first few non-tutorial zones. The developer has promised that characters made in the demo will be able to go to the live game, so… take the chance.

Shivering Steps will teach you cautious play. The mobs are initially a couple levels above you, come in groups, and come straight for you despite the valiant efforts of your party members. As a cloth-wearing Arcanist, I quickly learned to send the rest of the party in before I started nuking, and once I got the stun and charm spells, used both those every chance I got. The quest eventually gives the player an item that any class can use to help a little with this, but by that time, there’s not much that can really hurt you if you’re in a group.

The various NPCs will give you hints about where to go next — some in town, some can be tracked by their voices, some are where other NPCs were in the “live” world. The first thing a player new to the Shivering Steps should do is explore, see how the world has changed. A few bosses are where other bosses were on the flip side; some are in new places. I don’t think there was any boss that wasn’t pointed to by an NPC, even the last one, though that hint was pretty subtle and I had to ask the game developer for another hint, which he gladly gave, and that was enough. (The hint was: An NPC in town will tell you exactly how to do the thing. I went back, talked to everyone, and realized that what I thought was a bit of flavor text was actually the solution. And it turned out to be.)

Brian @ Burgee Media, the developer, was putting golden tickets on some mobs that could be redeemed for alpha game access. I wasn’t lucky enough to find one, so I’ll be sitting waiting for more. There’s a lot of fun stuff coming up — Brian’s talking about perhaps having your character appear as a simplayer in your friends’ games which would be pretty sweet.

My character, Moon Unit Zapper, is ready 🙂

You can (and should) wishlist Erenshor on Steam and play the demo. Make sure you get Scrubby on your team. He’s a little bit of a celebrity around town.