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| I finished Echo last night. by MM 06/13/2019, 3:15pm PDT | ||||
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Color me happily surprised. It's not an excellent game, but it is a good one, and it gets a 10/10 on the Fussbett Fable scale for visuals. It's like Metal Gear meets Warning Forever. The premise is in the far future a young woman in power armor is exploring an ancient planet-structure that resembles a palace for the technology to bring her friend back from the dead. The palace awakens but seems to be malfunctioning and starts making hundreds of hostile clones of her attempting to kill her before she can reach a mysterious coordinate hundreds of kilometers below the surface. A combination of stealth, gunplay, and Benny Hill chases result. The game's experimental twist is that the palace is observing and learning from your every action, represented by a vague ghost shadow that appears after you do something. At first the clones are mindless zombies who can only walk toward you and attack with their hands. But once the palace has observed enough it turns off all the lights and reboots. While the lights are off you have limited vision, but can take any action without being observed. After a couple seconds of darkness the lights come back on and all the clones are rebooted/resurrected, only now they can use every move the palace observed in the last light cycle, whether it's opening doors, hiding behind cover, or using the gun. If you can hold off on using a specific ability until the next reboot, the clones forget that move. It's amazing for a game with so few art assets how different it can make its various "worlds" feel, and some rooms are just jaw-droppingly gorgeous. The themes of the lore flirt with various harder sci-fi landmarks: 2001 obviously, but also Solaris, Rendezvous with Rama, and Forbidden Planet. People say the game is one level too long and I can kind of agree that I was getting impatient for the ending myself. Some people were pissed off by the ending but I thought it was a good one. Minor spoiler, but it's more about the characters than answering any questions about the world itself. And by gum it's an actual game with an actual loop of teaching you a new skill every world, then challenging that new skill in tougher and tougher ways, culminating in a "boss" room that's huge and filled with scattered key orbs that requires to shoot and/or sneak your way around to open the final exit. In a way it's the inverse experience of Katana Zero. I came expecting an art game and got a lot of solid gameplay instead. |
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I finished Echo last night. by 06/13/2019, 3:15pm PDT  |
