Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch

I track progression systems the way some people track sports scores, so a roguelite that hands me a nine-character roster with dual-weapon loadouts, branching skill upgrades, and a permanent meta-layer immediately has my attention. Lost Eidolons: Veil of the Witch earns that attention and mostly keeps it. Each expedition sends a party of five across a node map split into three acts, with a hidden fourth act waiting for players who reconstruct protagonist Ashe's fragmented memories across multiple runs. The branching path design forces genuine resource decisions at every fork: chase coin, loot, relationship development with companions, or campsite training that upgrades skills mid-run. That is real decision-making with real downstream consequences, not just flavor. The combat sits on a grid where Zone of Control actually matters. You cannot freely sidestep through an enemy's adjacent tiles, which means positioning your five-unit squad is never a casual afterthought. Every character carries two weapon loadouts, and swapping between them costs nothing on your action economy. Healer Evie flips from Tome to sword-and-shield when enemies close in; Laurent the elemental mage falls back on his bow when spell range is a liability; axe-wielder Marco picks up a spear for distance. The dual-weapon design gives the system real width without bloating the interface. Resonance stones add further weight to roster management: who gets the upgrade stones changes the run, full stop. The skill reset on expedition end sounds punishing but is actually the engine of replayability. Class promotions carry over via the Altar of Fire system, so you arrive at each fresh run with a higher ceiling even if the specific skill build starts blank. The honest criticism is twofold. First, the visual presentation is noticeably modest. In-game battle models read closer to an older console generation than the hand-drawn character portraits would suggest, and some reviewers found the gap jarring. Second, difficulty scaling has spikes. The second-act boss Bernhardt, a brute with AoE incapacitation and a health-reducing passive, is where a significant number of players hit a wall. Run length also skews longer than typical roguelite norms because reinforcement waves and resurrection-loop enemy encounters extend individual battles. Neither issue breaks the game, but grind-averse players should factor both in before buying. The Trials Mode unlocked post-campaign pushes difficulty even further for the set who find the base experience too comfortable once the roster opens up. For anyone asking whether prior Lost Eidolons experience is required: it is not. This is a fully standalone dark fantasy story, and the first game's political campaign structure has been replaced entirely by the personal, memory-driven narrative. The Metacritic score of 76 and a lifetime Steam rating sitting at 81 percent across over a thousand reviews is a fair read on a game that is genuinely well-constructed but not without friction. Critics who rated it lower tended to feel the roguelite loop and the tactics layer did not always reinforce each other cleanly. Critics who rated it higher focused on the build variety and the pull of one-more-run. Both camps are describing the same game accurately from different tolerance levels. If your personal Venn diagram includes Fire Emblem-style grid tactics and the permanent-progression loop of a modern roguelite, the overlap here is substantial.

Diego · Scout Team

Strategy & simulation

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