Eschalon: Book 1 - Reviews @ MacWorld, Twenty Sided

Basilisk's Eschalon has been reviewed at MacWorld, scoring a 3.5/5:

In fact, almost every interaction you have with the game is based on dice rolls. It’s extraordinarily non-linear in that respect, which is great for RPG players that just want to explore without feeling pressured to follow specific storylines or plots. The downside is that the game doesn’t necessarily play down to your level early on, so it’s possible—in fact, it’s very easy—to wander off into areas where there are higher-level monsters that will kill you almost immediately. This gets frustrating, so it takes some trial-and-error to find areas in the game you’re well-equipped and experienced enough to handle.

...and Twenty Sided continues their detailed critique with a third part that looks at character progression:

Character progression in Eschalon is fun and interesting. My biggest complaint is that the much needed in-game minimap is bound to the “cartography” skill. That is, if you don’t spend skill points on it, you don’t have a minimap. The map is pretty limited until you’ve reached about five ranks in cartography. It costs three skill points to acquire a skill, and then an additional point point for each additional rank. So, it will cost you about seven skill points to make the minimap do what you want. Considering that you only get three skill points each time you level up, this represents a major investment of points. Once you know the game you’ll discover a few ways to acquire points without sacrificing so much of your potential performance in battle, but I still dislike this idea of spending in-game skill points to make the game interface more useful. I also don’t see a need for it from a gameplay perspective: There are already lots of great skills in the game. If the minimap just worked and the cartography skill was taken away you’d never miss it.