The Star Named EOS Review: Bittersweet Puzzle-Led Story of a Boy & His Camera

Welcome to my The Star Named EOS review. We were not given a review code for this title.

• Buy The Star Named EOS on Steam
• Buy The Star Named EOS on Nintendo Switch
• Buy The Star Named EOS on Xbox

The Star Named EOS is a first-person, “hidden object” cozy puzzle game about a young man named Dei reminiscing on his family’s past by recreating his mother’s photography. The Star Named EOS is developed by Silver Line Studios in Taiwan and has been translated into English, Japanese, and Traditional Chinese.

Point-and-click your way through childhood bedrooms, cozy European cafes, scenic camping spots, and starry night skies to slowly uncover a heartfelt story about love and loss. With stunning hand-drawn Anime art, The Star Named EOS is a masterclass in environmental storytelling as each puzzle solution nudges you closer to learning the truth about Dei’s mother’s past.

“When you gaze at the stars, the stars also gaze at you.” —The Star Named EOS

The Star Named EOS is a meditative, calming game that opens with a peaceful keyboard soundtrack, character dialogue that sounds like poetry, and easy click-to-progress environmental storytelling. You’ll be set upon a few key areas with one goal in mind: To recreate various photographic scenes from your mother’s letters with whatever miscellany you can find (or unlock) around you. You’ll encounter a variety of smart, simple puzzles impeding your progress—weaving through mazes, lining up pieces of clues, uncovering passwords, and decoding strange symbols.

In Dei’s childhood room, where the gameplay begins in earnest, the puzzles are simple and clean. With the goal to arrange a photograph of flowers by a window with red curtains, you’ll start to poke around looking for what you need.

Do these symbols in a book mean anything special? What might the password to Dei’s safe be? If you hang up a poster on the wall, does it tell you anything new about the space? As these questions—and their answers—click into place, you’ll slowly but surely locate everything you need to recreate your scene. And once that’s done, with a snap of your handy camera to indicate completion, you’ll be swept up into the next scene. The one in the photograph, in fact.

For the first half of the game, each chapter progresses much the same way. Enter a scene retracing Dei’s mother’s footsteps, read a letter that contains a photo for the next area, and try to recreate that image by opening up the immediate world around you using clues and puzzles. It’s sweet, simple, and satisfying, scratching the same itch as games like Kings Quest VI and Amerzone from my childhood that got me into PC gaming in the first place.

In this story-rich cozy game, you’ll uncover Dei’s mother’s journey through letters and photographs. A photographer and journalist, she travelled the world, writing back to her son whenever she got the chance and philosophizing about beauty, light, and life. She also promised him a night of stargazing as soon as she came home—he marked it on the calendar above his desk, in fact. Slowly, as time passes, you start to realize something is missing. Something is wrong.

A thunderstorm in a dark forest. An old bedroom in tatters. A red sky, and something whistling overhead. It’s up to you to guide Dei out of this new darkness and back into the light.

Puzzle types you can expect to come across include hidden object, jigsaw puzzle, movement-based block puzzles, password collection and decoding, stacking and organizing, simple mazes, time and perspective play, and finding clues in written text. A seasoned puzzle gamer will have no problem recognizing these beloved tropes and finding their way through the increasingly difficult scenarios. However, there were one or two walkthrough-worthy riddles that I can see tripping up experts and novices alike.

No matter how you choose to untangle Dei’s mystery—whether white-knuckling it solo or leaning into help online—the emotional cacophony of the finale hits just as hard. I was in tears by the end of it, and there are tons of beautiful screenshots I’ll never be able to post for fear of spoiling anything. Every precious moment was a flicker of color in a dark world, peeling back the Stygian curtains, looking for that twinkle of hope somewhere far, far up in the nighttime sky.

Not to mention the soundtrack for The Star Named EOS deserved to win awards, and maybe it still can somewhere. You can listen to it on Spotify but I highly suggest experiencing it first through playing the game post-haste.

Overall, I have nothing bad to say about The Star named EOS, which almost never happens when I review a game. This bittersweet, narrative-dense puzzle game can be completed in a short 3-4 hours, but it will leave an everlasting impact. Swooping in on wings of my nostalgic love of point-and-click PC adventures, this game carved a place for itself in my top cozy games of 2024 with breathtaking ease. The art, the story, the characters, and the music of The Star Named EOS will stay with me forever, and 永遠, and 萬古.

Summary

Here’s a quick summary of the main points of my The Star Named EOS review, for those who don’t have time to read a whole article when they could be playing the free demo of 2025’s Amerzone on Steam right now.

Pros

• Heartfelt, bittersweet narrative
• Atmospheric puzzles and storytelling
• Smart, simple environmental puzzles
• Amazing voice acting in 3 languages
• Easily my gaming soundtrack of the year

Cons

• Best place to play is PC based on point-and-click controls
• A few very challenging puzzles near the end

The Star Named EOS is an artistic delight for the senses, mixing beautiful hand-drawn art with a memorable soundtrack and tactile point-and-click puzzles. I can heartily recommend this game to folks who like Anime narratives, hidden object puzzles, and/or heartfelt storytelling about life, love, loss, and family.

I truly think absolutely any gamer will enjoy The Star Named EOS for $9.99 or less, so be sure to wishlist it and watch for a sale. However, if it sounds like a game for you: Buy it now at any price. You won’t regret it.

Games like The Star Named EOS:

• Venba: Narrative-heavy cooking game about family, immigration, and belonging.
• Unpacking: Point-and-click organization with subtle environmental storytelling.
• The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood: Story-rich atmospheric puzzle-adventure where choices matter.
• She Could Fly: A documentary escape room about living with OCD.

Stay cozy, gamers!