I dunno how many times I sat LFG in EverQuest, just wasting hours away chatting or doing busywork or shooting the breeze at a dungeon zone while waiting for a spot to open up in some group. If I could just have NPCs with me, I could just do it myself.

EverQuest I and II eventually added “mercenaries”, powerful NPCs, that you could hire to duo. Final Fantasy XIV has their “trust” system that lets you hire NPCs to come with you, or just use named NPCs to handle new content. But these are, still, in an MMO, and there’s always the chance you’re going to have to share a spawn with actual players.

Not so in Erenshor. You’re the only player there. The rest of the OOC, LFG and local chatter are all NPCs who are LFG and mostly want to group with you and they feel like doing just whatever it is you feel like doing.

Erenshor group

The game evokes the original EverQuest. The terrain is low polygon; so are the characters and the monsters. The textures aren’t quite up to EQ’s standards, but anyone looking at the game will instantly know exactly which game it’s supposed to simulate.

The demo, currently live on Steam, is the prologue of the final game. It takes you through character creation, getting quests, making a group, clearing out a bandit camp, killing an open world boss, crafting, and a legitimate dungeon crawl with a quest to take you through it.

While I was streaming it, I had a chat with a player who had gone through the prologue with all four classes (Paladin, Druid, Duelist and Mage) and hinted at secrets I hadn’t yet found.

In town

Erenshor isn’t the first game to simulate an RPG. I think the first one I played was called “It’s a Wipe”, where you played the leader of a raid guild where actually winning a raid was overshadowed by guild politics, making sure everyone was kept happy with loot, defusing fights between members and such. Then there was the goat game MMO that just parodied everything you probably DIDN’T like about MMOs.

I played for a couple of hours and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Erenshor is not an EverQuest parody; it’s a legit game that’s perfect for short or long playing sessions. While there is no main quest leading you through the demo, NPCs will gently point you toward the things the game thinks you might want to be doing.

Highlights of my game

While I did “finish” the demo by solving the puzzle on how to get off the island, I still left quests undone. And, I’ve only tried the Duelist. I think the mage looks like a lot of fun. As for the tank and healer – well, I’ll let Scrubby go pull and Cyndara go heal while I deal the mad deeps that makes all the NPCs go OOOOOOOO.

You can try Erenshor for yourself at https://store.steampowered.com/app/2382520/Erenshor/.