The game starts out with our hero, a young girl, waking up a little before midnight and finding herself unable to go back to sleep. This opening sequence dragged on a little long for me, though I find that this was entirely my fault: I was exploring the house and missed the cue about there being Something to see outside the window. So for a while, it seemed as if the entire game was going to be about silently sneaking around the house after midnight, and that might have made a fine game by itself. Then the sylph appeared and the game made a left turn into ... something else. Something much less mundane. And the real game began.
It's not entirely clear what is real and what is not. Is the sylph a real being, or is she no more than a projection of the heroine's mind? The title is significant: "Eidolon", a spirit-image. Real or not, the sylph is a mirror of our hero, a sort of negative representation. There's some suggestion that the heroine has had some behavioural issues in the past -- hitting people and breaking things as a result of some sort of meltdown? -- and the entire experience of tonight functions both as a sort of moral fable and as a tale of healing: on the one hand, there is the sense that our hero's predicament is due to her propensity for violence; on the other hand, there is the suggestion that, as the sylph is a reflection of our hero, embracing her as a friend means mending a rift in our hero's psyche, and our hero wakes up the next morning finally "whole" and unable to remember the events of that night.
It's Twine, so of course there are a few special text effects, which I find irritating and superfluous; this piece of work could get by just as well without them, in my opinion. But I do appreciate the incorporation of puzzles, and the scope for exploration. In a way, this is a parser game design implemented in hypertext. It combines the lateral freedom of parser games with the direction of hypertext, and I find that, for the most part, it succeeds.
Fresh peaches and watermelon, yoghurt, and tea with lemon and honey.