In Eets, the creature moves only when you read its mood right

Klei Entertainment's first game is back after years off sale, and it splits the people playing it: some praise the room to improvise a way through, others complain that every level has exactly one right answer.

A creature that answers to nothing but its own mood

Don't Starve came later. First, Klei Entertainment built something else: a stubborn creature that walks wherever its mood tells it to. In Eets, feeding it candy, coffee or medicine changes its state, and each state changes the way it travels through a level. You don't order the creature around; you lay out the path and let its mood do the rest.

The store page itself boils the formula down to two classics: the logic of Lemmings and the engineering of The Incredible Machine. There are more than 100 levels, each a little trickier than the one that came ahead of it, populated by odd characters that all react in their own way to whatever turns up along the route.

The game the store itself pulled is back for the studio's anniversary

Eets arrived in December 2006, the first thing Klei ever shipped as a studio. It sat on Steam's shelves for years, and time sent the bill: in 2015 it came off sale, because it no longer ran on current machines. Klei held on to the game anyway and, to mark the studio's 20 years, rebuilt whatever needed rebuilding to get it running again — a Linux version included. The studio handed that work back to the public at no charge, as a gesture toward preserving its own history. Without quite realising it, you're playing a museum piece that barely made it.

The return came with the same amount of care the game always had: one bug froze the screen when the creature fell off a ledge in the tutorial. The studio fixed it, thanked by name the player who had flagged it, and joked that 20 years on, this sort of thing still happens.

One hour, 1,719 hours: the logic still lands

A player writing in Portuguese, past 1,719 hours in the game, describes the mechanic fondly: steering Eets means understanding how each creature reacts on its own, with no direct command. Another, six hours in, agrees about the difficulty curve but points out that the final levels swap puzzle-solving for pure reflex — more a matter of reaction time than of thinking.

Ever stumbled onto a solution the game never hinted at, and found it works anyway? That's the moment the longer accounts keep coming back to. One hour in, a Russian player says the sheer number of different mechanics caught them off guard, even while finding the puzzles simple. Five hours were enough for another to praise that freedom to try routes the designers never planned for, and to single out how the animations give each creature a personality. A third, three hours in, calls the game a time capsule from 2006 and tips their hat to Klei.

One player's freedom is another player's straitjacket

The sharpest complaint isn't about difficulty; it's about method. One player reports finding, as early as the second level, a solution that used the same piece in the same way as the answer the game expected — only pointing the other way — and having it turned down all the same. Picture hitting on that very logic, mirrored, and being told by the game that it's wrong. For anyone praising the range of possible solutions, there's the contradiction: the game promises room to invent, yet at certain points it accepts only the route its own designers drew.

Other gripes aim at the presentation rather than the thinking. A German player, short of a single hour in, calls the soundtrack grating, the menu confusing and the game window locked to a fixed size with no fullscreen option — for them, the whole package has aged badly. Two hours in, a Ukrainian player finds the repetition wearing: the first puzzles are fun, but the same trick with small variations tires after the opening batch of levels, even when new items show up along the route. Also at the two-hour mark, a third player sums up the discomfort bluntly, saying they would take anything genuinely terrible over carrying on.

For players who'll take the game's answer, not for those who want their own

The split here isn't liking or disliking; it's what each player expected to do with their own head. If you're up for probing the route the game has already settled on, and you enjoy the logic of nudging a stubborn creature along by way of its moods, there's reason to come back — that's how it went for the player past 1,719 hours without tiring of it. If you expect to shape your own solution, to play in a language other than English, or to open it in a window that fills the screen, you hit the wall in the very first level, hour counter still at zero — which is where several of the harshest verdicts stopped. It isn't a hidden flaw: it's the design of a 2006 game, unlocked again without pretending to be anything else.